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I got 2 new (2nd hand, but new to me) Raspberry Pi’s 4 with 8GB ram each. Both have a heatsink “case” that keeps them under 70°C under full load. It’s not a full case which is nice because it doesn’t increase the footprint. But they still offer enough protection to throw them around on my desk without shorting out on something (their is a plate on the bottom as well. I first tried with some microSD cards but they are slow and flaky for running the OS, even when using high speed cards. So I got some USB to SATA adapters (with a too long cable) and some old SSDs. A lot more bulky but at least I can trust them. And it is not too bad when you add some 3D-printed feet and a cable tie.

My main plan is to get my CI (maybe also CD) in order. I want to provide my main projects (like this blog) with multi-architecture container images. Emulation of ARM was way too slow for my liking (over 40 minutes for a clean build!). So to native hardware we go. The 2nd Pi is still up in the air. Maybe a music streaming box attached to some speakers (if I can find some decent software for it). Or maybe just some extra compute, never hurts to be prepared.

2 Raspberry Pi with SSD

New NAS!!

My previous NAS was an old Fujitsu tower with two Seagate Barracuda 4TB disks running in a ZFS mirror (4TB is plenty of room for my needs). It used about 25 watts at idle. Now I upgraded to a ZimaBlade 7700 NAS kit running an Intel E3950 with 16 GB RAM. A decent jump in performance from 2 to 4 cores but still around the same generation and same amount of DDR3 memory. But I went to 8 watts at idle and it is way way way smaller. Going from a full-size tower to the almost smallest size a 2-disk NAS can be. And it is still low cost.

In terms of software, I wanted away from Proxmox. It was overkill for what I need. My NAS is purely a NAS, all applications run on the Kubernetes cluster. And even if I run any application I want OCI containers, virtual machines are useless to me. So the best option to me seems TrueNAS and it is running very smoothly the first couple of weeks. The setup was also a lot easier comparted to ZFS on Proxmox. And it is better managed and I have actual visibility on my drive’s health. Overall, a huge upgrade.

zimablade nas