I’ve had a great experience with the TrueNAS Mini-X system I bought. ZFS has great raid options, and TrueNAS makes managing a system really easy. You can get a box built & configured by them, with 16 GB ECC RAM and five (empty) drive bays, for about $1150 at the most affordable end. https://www.truenas.com/truenas-mini/

One thing to be careful about: you can’t add drives to a ZFS vdev once it’s been created, but you can add new vdevs to an existing pool. So, you can start with two mirrored drives, then add another two mirrored drives to that pool later.

(A vdev is a sub-unit of a ZFS storage pool, and you have to choose your RAID topology for each vdev and then compose those into a storage pool)

The common wisdom about backups is the 3-2-1 backup strategy, which recommends:

• 3 total copies of your data, including your original or “production” data
• 2 different forms of media
• 1 off-site copy

Proton Drive can be a decent off-site backup, but it would be a good idea to make a separate backup of your data on a different form of media like an external hard drive, just in case Proton Drive goes down, or the data there gets corrupted and you need to restore a known good version.

Check out gamemode if you’re gaming, it should improve performance a little bit

There are a bunch of message broker services out there, and having a consistent set of common keys along with a documented process for transforming events to/from different systems means that this kind of data can move through different systems without getting mangled. It does have a spec for JSON, so it can be considered just a standardized JSON blob with transformation rules. But it also has a protobuf spec, specs for MQTT, NATS, HTTP, Avro, etc. It’s a common language for all these systems.

I’m really into CloudEvents because I love event-driven systems, and since events can come from, or be consumed by, so many different services, having a robust spec is super duper useful.

Then they put on the socks and become girls

ixSystems sells pre-built machines running TrueNAS. They’re a little pricier than building on from scratch of course, but they have ECC ram and have everything set up out of the box. Funds also support the development of TrueNAS. I got one earlier this year and I love it. Fussing around in the web UI requires some technical know-how, but if you get it set up for them, I expect it to run like a dream.

I was using Fedora for about a year and it was great. Nice and stable, almost everything worked out of the box. Then I goofed up an update and had to install something new, and I chose Arch. Arch is working mostly fine, of course I had to learn a thing or two about how some subsystems worked but the Arch wiki is a wonderful resource. We’ll see how long this install lasts, it’s been smooth sailing for about a month now.

You love to see it. Linux Mint was my daily driver for a long time, it’s a great choice.

Okay I’m actually really hyped about this