I've got a 13 year old 4TB Hitachi happily chugging along in my array, with not a single blip to its name so far. As long as anything important is backed up and you're ready to swap in a new disk when one fails, you should be fine. Have fun!

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HDD prices have gone up so much. I went to refresh and replace some of my 4 and 8TB old ones with 14TB, and was horrified at how expensive 4 and 8 still are compared to when I bought them years ago. It's why I went with Snapraid and mergerfs for my big media array. Can use any mixed sizes and types of disk, parity is confined to specific disks, only disks in use spin up, and if the array fails then I can still read each disk independently so only lose the disks that died. It's great for WORM type setups, doing the overnight sync and able to recover from disk loss if needed. I have had to do that, and it worked perfectly.

If you do get a Poweredge or similar, I recommend putting something like Proxmox on to start with and then out OMV on that. Keep to a very basic config for Proxmox, don't try and learn too much to start with, and then pop OMV on as a VM. That'll let you then be able to add other VMs/containers and nodes to the system later as you learn it. Though OMV can do a little of that as well, so can always just install that directly and get used to the options that provides first.

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I used to use OMV many years back. Ended up building a custom Arch Linux based setup and used that for a longtime. Giving Proxmox a go currently.

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Yeah, I've stayed away from the off the shelf NAS systems as I have friends who have run into various such issues with them. I used to have an HP N40L years back but I've mostly used random cobbled together systems put together myself since then. However they can have their own issues and can be a lot more fiddly to work with. I've been very happy with this T430 and a load of 14TB drives, and I'm considering getting another with more bays.

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@jarmer Some of the NAS devices are decent, and they are small and quiet. Probably also more power efficient, you do need to factor that in as well. However they can be more expensive up front and limiting on size and expansion later

I'm running a Dell Poweredge T430 (got it cheap) and it's been solid. Updated the firmware to latest really easily, it has a remote management idrac tool, can take up to 1TB RAM, has two NICs, has two power supplies, and has two CPU sockets. Here in the UK you can pickup the 3.5GHz 14 core/28 thread Xeons for it at £30 each.

I'm using it in the 8x bay setup with a load of disks in a Snapraid array. But it has hardware RAID if you want that. And a bunch of spare internal mini-SAS connectors that you can convert to 4xSATA each and mount drives internally as well. I'm running the OS on a RAID1 mirror that way, with two SSDs mounted inside. It's surprisingly quiet, has been temporarily sitting in our lounge and not disturbing us. Lots of easy expandibility options.

Not sure what prices are where you are but you can get them in basic setups for only a couple of hundred £ in the UK, including RAM and some drives. There is also a 16x bay option for 2.5" format disks if preferred. And they do rack versions as well. I have been very happy with it. The ability to add a lot more RAM and CPU cores cheaply also means it works really well as a hypervisor, so can do more than just provide storage.

eBay example [External Link]

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It depends on where you want to house the storage unit. You can pick up secondhand either rack or tower storage servers for quite a decent price. Stuff that full of drives and shove in a corner somewhere, network it and just use it for storage. Advantage with a lot of them is that they also often come with multiple NICs so you can aggregate them as desired if needed, and CPUs for them are usually pretty cheap.

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I have multiple friends and family who previously had no interest in the Deck and certainly no interest in Linux who are now planning to buy the Machine and some also interested in the Frame.

When I asked why, the Machine has really resonated with them. They've seen my Deck and think it's good but wasn't for them as they just didn't want a handheld and it is now a bit underpowered for their tastes. Most are gamers and either already have much older machines they were planning to relace and so this is still a upgrade for them, or they have a decent PC already but wanted something small and quiet in an HTPC style for their lounge or bedroom. They really like the small form factor, the decent but not power/thermal hungry specs, the resulting low noise factor, and the console ease of use of the device, while still allowing them flexibility as a PC for game modding and custom changes if they decide to.

A number of them were not exactly anti-Linux but they were definitely Windows first and generally shied away from Linux in any form. Seeing SteamOS over the last few years, even on a handheld they didn't want, has changed their minds.

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I'm running an older Ryzen 6core with a 7600 using 8GB VRAM and 16GB RAM already and it is surprisingly capable. So this isn't really much different for me. It is a lot smaller and better integrated though. I expect that there are also a lot of optimisations on the hardware and software. I think my major wish is that it had 32GB RAM for the system as that is a bottleneck I have been hitting for some games.

However, none of our TVs are above 1080p and I don't know when we'll bother upgrading. All three are by now well over 12 years old I believe and they just keep chugging along quite happily.

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I haven't yet tried to play it on my Deck. I know it's rated to be great on Deck, but does its relatively complex, text-heavy UI even work all that well on it?

The Deck gets a different UI entirely so that it works on the smaller screen and with controller support.

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They probably are using a bumped version of Clausewitz.

Does seem to be the case. It looks very similar to the existing CK3 and Vicky3 games, so likely a slightly updated version of that.

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