Well I already have the 1TB SSD backing up its content when needed to the 1TB WD Blue that i happen to have from way early days. It’s not RAID because the Pi bottlenecks the speed, and since its Videos and Music its also not constantly changing Data.
And both Drives are a Backup. ^^
Also now your Username makes more sense to me but it also makes LESS sense to me at the same time! Which one of the two is your first name and which your family/last name? XD
First name is Phillip, just like it’s displayed. When I grew up in the '90s the standard in the US for usernames was first initial + last name. It was really funny when my high school computer teacher thought the account “backusm” was a backdoor account someone created, but the guy’s name was Matt Backus.
If you are storing a large media library you might want to look at… I think it was called unraid? You just store files on multiple drives normally, then run a program to compute the parity. If a drive fails, you can run the program to use the parity to reconstitute the missing files, but normal access only uses the one drive the file is on like normal. It’s nice for media libraries that are mostly read-only and where you may want to keep most of the drives in sleep mode and only wake up the one you need to spool your video from, and don’t need the extra performance from striping the data across multiple drives. I’ve never used it but it seems kind of neat.
RAID 6 is better for that, it also has parity restore and no need for special program support.
Seems like something nice is coming up on the Pi front. 
And most importantly, the thing I would like to get, because it is awesome:
Now a normal person should never get this as a Desktop, for that I would rather recommend the official Compute Module 4 IO Board. But the Turing Pi 2 can be quite useful for my plans. I can run one CM4 as Desktop, while running another as Network/Firewall/Download Manager, and still have 2 CM4s left afterwards which I can use for Test hosting Mechaenetia Game Servers (one of which I would have perpetually running in the background for long time NPC AI experiments). All of which are in one decent ARM based Computer Cluster.
I am also pretty sure that the CM4 when overclocked correctly should be slightly faster than my current Computer, but we will see about that, because Intel x86 might still be faster than ARM in this regard. ^^
Yes I have not been active much this year, especially not this month… I either got distracted by Games, GT6, binge watching Series I started watching over a decade ago (so I am finally done with them), or suffering from the seasonal Temperature shifts and sleep-deprivation-causing Migraines…
And they follow up with this thing!
The new Ethernet Chip they use in it actually supports PoE but the Pi 400 itself sadly does not.
Also the naming is gonna be awkward in a couple hundred years when they release an actual Pi 400 XD
I personally would rather get a different designed Keyboard Pi than this thing, but I do see the appeal to people who need an easy to acquire 70$ Computer. ^^
We’ve gone full circle
Yeah one of the Pi Creators said he wanted to add a rainbow stripe to the Keyboard XD
So I finally decided to install Pi-Hole on my PoE-HAT-Pi-4B-4GB, and it is damn good at blocking not only Ads, but also a bunch of random Websites, like the ones certain Modders use for checking/announcing Updates. Also found out that the old official Minecraft Launcher connects to tumblr for some weird fucking reason. Pi-Hole also doesn’t eat much performance, and is easily Browser accessible from any other Computer in the Network.
I originally used the Pi as a Backup NAS, but that made some problems, because the USB 3 Chip tends to overheat and disconnect the Drives, and the PoE HAT Fan doesn’t react to the USB Chips Temperatures, and even if it did, I hate Fan noise so that isn’t an option either.
Luckily this was just a proof of concept, so I know that I can do it if I wanted to, not like i have a ton of USB Hubs to connect the Drives to if needed.
I managed to install KDE Plasma Desktop to the Pi too, while also ripping out all the unnecessary junk that was preinstalled with Rasbian/Raspberry-Pi-OS.
I am surprised just how much junk was installed there. GTK Desktop, QT Desktop and OpenBox Desktop, along with Chromium Browser and 3 other random ass Browsers that aren’t Firefox.
Apparently the “sudo” Group is also not listed as being an admin authority, while the “pi” User specifically was. And that with the default Pi Repository, so that once you replace the “pi” User like the security conscious person you are, it is resulting in an annoying Issue when you get an UI prompt for your sudo password and you can only select the User “root”, to enter your password for (and not your own User), which ofcourse doesn’t have a password, because only idiots have a permanent password on the “root” User.
But I finally got that fixed, so I can use a Text Editor that isn’t fucking nano to edit the boot config of the Pi.
I also decided to put that tiny Intenso USB Stick, that is smaller than a Wireless Mouse Dongle, into the Pi-Keyboard-USB-Hub, so I can access Scripts and other Stuff on the Pi’s easier without having to bother with Network Setup when messing with random Pi’s.
This is about all the Pi Adventures I had the last three days. Always nice to sort out things, and monitoring even more of those stupid Background Applications phoning home.
That’s what I use my pi for, though I find it doesn’t block nearly enough by its own and I have to run with browser blocking extensions too. What lists do you use?
By the way “location.services.mozilla.com” is the top blocked thing on my Pi-Hole. It is one thing to have it try guess my location, but a whole other thing to spam that request more often than everything else, especially if it does not even work for the way my Internet connects. (I sure as heck am not in any large City like Berlin, Frankfurt or München)
I should also mention that there is this thing called “Font CDNs” that can severely slow down certain Websites such as Youtube. That is why I am blocking stuff like “fonts.gstatic.com” and “fonts.googleapis.com” for example, because unlike common sense, these Fonts dont fucking get cached, and in case of Youtube, they dont even use Fonts to render emojis and Stuff so that is quite useless too.
Just mentioning the Pi 5 being announced:
