I generally agree, but keep in mind that CPU TDP is not a good metric to predict the total power consumption of a home server. Most of the time, the CPU is in a very low power state and the power consumption is dominated by things like the mainboard, drives, PSU, … Wolfgang has a good video on the topic: https://youtu.be/Ppo6C_JhDHM?t=239

That said, the conclusion that the 5600U system draws more power than a N150 one is probably still correct in most cases.

The Ryzen 5000 series should be a good choice for such an application, they’re still quite powerful CPUs. You should just make sure that you get the notebook/APU variant of the CPUs (e.g. 5600G or 5600U) and not the desktop variant (e.g. 5600 or 5600X). The desktop variant has significantly higher idle power consumption (see e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/HomeServer/comments/1l707yc/nas_idle_power_usage/, they report 50+W in idle, while my 8500G system idles at 17W). The one you linked should be fine.

Read (only) access should be fine. What makes it complicated is if there can be writes from multiple locations. Basically, the simple version would be to just periodically copy the data from the primary to all secondary locations.

I can see why you’d want to go with an off-the-shelf NAS. But, I would carefully check if it supports your use case, as it’s quite advanced.

If the data only needs to be read & written from a single server (and the others are just backups), you can also use simpler replication instead of synchthing. E.g. syncoid or TrueNAS replication. It sounds like you should be able to do that with separate datasets per household in your usecase.

I would probably go with a simple approach like this:

• ZFS: Each house gets a “NAS” that provides a ZFS filesystem to store the data. This gives you the ability to share the drives across your use cases (you, rest of the family), snapshots, RAIDZ support, and usage quotas. For the OS, you could use what you prefer (TrueNAS, Debian, Ubuntu, …).
• Syncthing to synchronize the files across the servers/houses. This allows you to read and write data from anywhere and syncthing will mirror the writes to the other places. I use it to synchronize data across 5 devices and it works quite well.

There are probably more advanced (enterprise?) ways to handle the file synchronization. But, I think this hould be good enough for normal, personal use. The main disadvantage is that you’re only synchronizing the current data (excluding the ZFS snapshots). On the other hand, this also allows you to mix file systems if necessary.

I’m not quite sure what you’re trying to do here. Are you

1. Trying to create a new owncloud instance and put your data somewhere other than in /var, or
2. Try to move the data location of an existing owncloud instance?

If you’re trying to do the second one, there’s a useful guide on it here: https://omiid.me/notebook/25/move-docker-volume-to-bind-mount. The first one should be even simpler, you can just replace the volumes in the compose file by bind mounts (basically, just this step of the tutorial: https://omiid.me/notebook/25/move-docker-volume-to-bind-mount#modifying-docker-compose).

Yeah, that seems quite weird and not customer friendly at all. I was wondering if it has something to do with Steam’s in-game purchase conditions (mostly the fee).

Players can only access the lowest rank of competitive gameplay for free, and access to any higher levels costs a subscription fee of $2.50 a month. That’s right, you’ll need a subscription to play GeoGuessr on Steam, for some reason.

Not only is this price point bizarre for a game that you can literally just hop into similar browser versions and play for free, but […]

GeoGuessr has required a subscription to actually play for a while now. I think they had a very limited Free tier until 2024, but it was not a great experience. The developers claim that they need to charge a subscription fee because they need to pay Google for the Streetview API access. To me, that seems plausible and would justify a subscription model (as opposed to a one-time purchase).

On the other hand, OpenGuessr seems to be a free alternative that offers a very similar game. That certainly seems like a better alternative if it’s sustainable.

Yes, the classic AMD strategy to mess up launch-day reviews…

Forgejo became a hard fork about a year ago: https://forgejo.org/2024-02-forking-forward/ And it seems that migration from Gitea is only possible up to Gitea version 1.22: https://forgejo.org/2024-12-gitea-compatibility/

What a terrible article. The margins for board partners is small, but Nvidias margin is huge.

This seems to be a limitation of Intel host controllers. The USB 2.0 specification (including 12 Mbps Full Speed) allows for up to 127 devices. Each of those devices can have up to 16 IN and 16 OUT endpoints, c.f. https://www.usbmadesimple.co.uk/ums_3.htm Depending on how you count, that would be a maximum of 2k to 4k endpoints in total. I guess Intel thought it wasn’t worthwhile supporting that many endpoints.

Some quick searching turned up this post that claims that USB3 controllers often support up to 254 endpoints (in total). https://www.cambrionix.com/a-quick-guide-to-usb-endpoint-limitations/ Other posters have also said that AMD appears to have higher limits. You could also consider adding more USB root hubs to your system (with PCIe cards).

Unfotunately, I can help you with that. The machine is not running any VMs.

It’s possible, but you should be able to see it quite easily. In my case, the CPU utilization was very low, so the same test should also not be CPU-bottlenecked on your system.

I’m seeing very similar speeds on my two-HDD RAID1. The computer has an AMD 8500G CPU but the load from ZFS is minimal. Reading / writing a 50GB /dev/urandom file (larger than the cache) gives me:

• 169 MB/s write
• 254 MB/s read

What’s your setup?

With version 2.3 (currently in RC), ZFS will at least support RAIDZ expansion. That should already help a lot for a NAS usecase.

That system also sounds a lot more capable than mine. How did you end up with 25 VMs?

I’m running it in a regular mATX case (Node 804) but I think you can also get AM5 motherboards in rack-mount cases.

Perhaps my recent NAS/home server build can serve as a bit of an inspiration for you:

• AMD Ryzen 8500G (8 cores, much more powerful than your two CPUs, with iGPU)
• Standard B650 mainboard, 32 GB RAM
• 2 x used 10 TB HDDs in a ZFS pool (mainboard has 4x SATA ports)
• Debian Bookworm with Docker containers for applications (containers should be more efficient than VMs).
• Average power consumption of 19W. Usually cooled passively.

I don’t think it’s more efficient to separate processing and storage so I’d only go for that if you want to play around with a cluster. I would also avoid SD cards as a root FS, as they tend to die early and catastrophically.