I have enough people I dislike and disagree with IRL, I will have all my opinions confirmed when I’m browsing online, thankyouverymuch. /s

The seller mentions the drives are fully tested, but does not offer a warranty, aside from the Ebay 30-day return policy.

I left a comment to the Ebay seller and asked the same question, but I did not get a reply.

Ah yes ! I just fixed that. Thanks.

What do you use for the bit-by-bit test and how long does it take (depending on disk size) ? I have read about badblocks and that it could take an entire week to test one drive of 12TB, I didn’t have the patient to do that. The long SMART test already took nearly 20 hours in my case.

Thank you

Thank you ! It was a cool design project, but I ended up no publishing the design as it is quite difficult to assemble and work with. here are a couple more photos:

The black box with white front and blue LED lights, yes. I designed and built it myself. The case is made of laser-cuted plexiglass and 3D printed parts. The front plate is PLA, internals are PETG. It’s build around an ARM Single-Board Computer: NanoPi M4V2 with a SATA extension hat.

In a previous post, some were recommending me to use helium-sealed drives for lower noise. The disks I’ve bought are helium-sealed, but they are definitely a little louder at 7200rpm than 5400rpm drives. It’s still acceptable.

I love jellyfin, it’s great ! I haven’t played with Plex much to be honest, so I can’t really compare

My media collection is not backed-up, expect for the spare disks I have now. My photos and documents are encrypted weekly and sent to pCloud. They are also synchronized to my computer and phone with Syncthing. This way the important files are protected by 3-2-1.

why not btrfs send | btrfs receive? is there some advantage to rsync?

I didn’t think of this. I am familiar with rsync, I went with it without searching for alternatives.

did you hotswap the drives after each btrfs replace or shutdown and then swap?

I did the swap with the system powered down. I don’t know if my the NanoPi + SATA hat support hotswap.

what’s your host OS and do the drives spin down if inactive?

The NAS runs Armbian. The disks are configured to spin down, yes. I don’t know if this caused me the issue while replacing disk 2. I suppose not, since during replace the disks are all reading continuously. But I don’t know for sure.

Edit: fixed copy-past mistake with quoted sentences

I guess I got lucky with this batch, they all seem to work perfectly. But only time will tell if this what truly a good deal.

Cool cool cool cool. Can I buy 16GB now and upgrade my Mac later ?

The client for Android TV works very nicely. Maybe there is a way to use the same UI on consoles?

I feel like outdated software on the stable distro like Debian has become less of a problem with the development of flatpak.

Fedora is a very solid, no nonsense distro. It gives you a vanilla Linux experience, with sane defaults out of the box. You get major updates every 6 month shipping newer version of the core stuff (kernel, desktop environment, etc). The Fedora community is dedicated to deliver a reliable OS and tests a lot before shipping updates.

It’s my favorite desktop/laptop distro for many years.

However, there are a couple a pitfalls to avoid. If you go for it, follow some beginners guide to get you sorted out with things like codecs and proprietary drivers. E.g: Things to do after installing Fedora 40 - itsfoss.com I would definitely recommend to do steps 2, 3, 4 and 5 from this guide.

Ubuntu isn’t such a bad choice if you want to quickly spin up a server.

It’s a famous copypasta

Encrypt first, then upload. Of course, not always easily applicable.