I guess I’m starting a decline, but not a big one, in my lifestyle changes. It’s been a hard week. It’s been a long week. Not having the 30000 projects to fall into when things are stressful has consequences. I’m being forced to face realities instead of escape into whatever.
One of the things I wanted to do was build a Synology NAS to be a server for all of the media I’ve purchased on blu ray and DVD over the years and ripped to my hard drives. It would have required a base unit, an expansion unit and 10 brand new 14tb hard drives… and cost somewhere in the range of $12,000 in today’s pricing.
So… I have computer parts lying around (and a SSD drive waiting at Best Buy) and will be building a computer to act as a Network Attached Server (NAS) instead. Total cost so far? $14 for a Windows 10 license and $60 for the SSD. $74 compared with $12k.
There are downsides. Essentially, I did this setup before in a big computer case a few years back. This is the same motherboard/processor as that and most of the same hard drives. I’ll upgrade the drives and I need to but instead of running this setup from the network and playing the video over my xbox, I’m going to be running the computer directly on my 65” TV via a HDMI cable and using the video and audio out from the motherboard.
I will probably upgrade to a dedicated video card at some point (the system has integrated video). I won’t repeat the same problems of the old systems as 8 of the 10 hard drives are external now, with external connectors and external power supplies. I won’t be “losing” internal drives any more. It’s gonna work, dammit. It’s gonna work.
With that, I return you to the insanity that is…
Jim