I second the idea of a VPN instead of directly exposing devices or software to the internet. Requires more work and learning but it’s more secure. I would argue that well-known VPNs are more scrutinized and pentested than any camera software ever.

Turris Omnia. Powerful hardware, auto updates, config backup / restore (with anti-bricking feature), SIM slot, etc

As someone reading this thread, I’m stuck in an endless loop.

Holy shit, I stand corrected, those graphs speak for themselves. Bookmarked for future stats.

LE: Well, there’s also the section about average age of failure in their newest report: 2 years and 7 months for HDDs, 14 months for SSDs.

True, but it depends from person to person and it counts if you have a small or big drive, how often you watch and rotate your media, how large the media is. If you only have a 1TB SSD, and often download and watch blue-ray quality, 20 movies will fill it. It won’t be long until the same blocks get erased, no matter how much the SSDs firmware tries to spread the usage and avoid reusing the same blocks.

Anyway, my point is, aside from noise and lower power consumption advantages, I wouldn’t use SSDs for a NAS, I regard them as consumables. Speed isn’t really an issue in HDDs.

I use Hard Disk Sentinel, it’s not free, but it also monitors drives in Windows so you have an early warning at the first sign of issues. Also logs historic data (writes, temperature, etc) and displays them as graphs.

Failure rates for sdd are better than hdd

I’m curious on where did you find this. Maybe they have lower DOA rates and decreased chances to fail in the first year, but SSDs have a limited usage lifetime / limited writes, so even if they don’t fail quickly, they wear out over time and at first they have degraded performance, but finally succumb in 5 years or less, even when lightly used (as in as OS drives).

To avoid DOA / first year issues with HDDs, just have the patience to fully scan them before using with a good disk testing app.

From my experience, SSDs are more prone to failure and have limited writes. They are ment for running the OS, databases for fast access, and games / apps. They are not ment for long time storage and frequent overwrites, like movies, which usually means download, delete and repeat which wears the memory quickly. One uses electric current to short memory cells and switch them from 0 to 1 and viceversa, the other uses a magnetic layer which supports a lot more overwrites on the same bit.

If keeping important data on them, I would use them only in a redundant RAID configuration and/or with frequent backups so I wouldn’t cry if one of them fails. And when they fail, there are no recovery options as with HDDs (even if very expensive, at least you have a chance).

I also wouldn’t touch used server SSDs, their lifetime is already shortened from the start. I had 3 Intel, enterprise-grade SSD changes in our company servers, each after about 3 years - they just wear out. For consumer / home SSDs the typical lifetime is 5 years, but that takes into account minor / “normal” usage, ie. if used as OS disks. And maybe power users could extend that with moving the swap/pagefile and temporary files (ie browser cache, logs, etc) on a spinning disk, but it defeats the purpose of having an SSD for speed in the first place.

If you have media (like movies) in mind, you’ll find sooner than later that you’ll need more space, and with HDDs the price per GB is lower than SSDs.

If you have no issue with 1. noise, 2. speed (any HDD is fast enough for movie playback and are decent for download), 3. concurrent access, or 4. physical shocks from transport, go with HDDs, even used ones.

My two, personal opinion cents.

Decent game!

Started with one RPi 3, ended up with 5 in a case that needed ventilation and a switch. It looks cute, but… The only one working to my pleasing is PiHole. Nextcloud is slow as hell (you are bound to external HDDs over USB and that sucks). 3 use normal HDMI ports, 2 mini HDMI. When shit hits the fan and SSH doesn’t work for some reason, I have to plug in a monitor and keyboard.

Oh, and one SD card went poof due to not noticing it had no free space left and still writing logs on it for 2 weeks. SD cards are unreliable in general.

I regret not using VMs on a more beefy mini PC that I could have upgraded to my pleasing, benefit from SATA, and would have been easier to maintain.

So I would recommand RPis if you actually need and use the IO ports. Otherwise, you will soon learn they get overburdened. For general self hosting, myself would have gone the ProxMox route (which has a free tier and that’s what I have experience with).

Started with one RPi 3, ended up with 5 in a case that needed ventilation and a switch. It looks cute, but… The only one working to my pleasing is PiHole. Nextcloud is slow as hell (you are bound to external HDDs over USB and that sucks).

Oh, and one SD card went poof due to not moticing it had no free space left and still writing logs on it for 2 weeks. SD cards are unreliable in general.

I regret not using VMs on a more beefy mini PC that I could have upgraded to my pleasing, benefit from SATA, and would have been easier to maintain.

Tab Groups (which is a native feature, not an extension, but not sure if available on Mac)? Or just multiple windows + Session Buddy to stowe away / restore your tabs / windows.

I’ve got all Meta IPs blocked at DNS level via PiHole on my LAN. I’m not that crazy to click the disable button. The gates of hell will remain closed in my house.