Are clouds an acceptable alternative to your own hard drives? -?Any? links to good hardware forums or pointers to external HDD enclosures?with? controllers that never go stand by?

[gene heskett]

On 2/6/26 11:33, Robert Heller wrote:
> RPi's are cheap.  Nothing stopping you from having multiple "NAS" boxes.
> RPi's since RPi 2's all have WiFi, so you don't need to string CAT6 cables all
> over the house (but if you want Gig speed access, you'll want the CAT6).
> Whether or not you bother with RAID or not will depend...
>
> (Note that there are cheap RPi clones from China that will also work just fine
> as the "brains" of a NAS box.)
Pi clone's are cheap, but if you want real storage, raid6 to the rescue, 
but 11T will cost you about $1200 for 5 of the 4Tb SSD drives, plus 5 
startech USB3.1 to Sata cables, and two 7 port usb3.1 hubs, so I've 
about $1600 total in it. But it goes thru 3 CNC machines and 3 printers 
plus this machine in about 35 minutes. Draws about 14.5 watts sitting 
idle and very occasionally peaks at 19.25 watts running a backup.  Sweet!
>
> There also exist various software packages to keep things sync'ed as well.
>
> At Fri, 06 Feb 2026 16:57:02 +0100 "Ubuntu user technical support,? not for general discussions" <ubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com> wrote:
>
>> On Fri, 2026-02-06 at 10:34 -0500, Robert Heller wrote:
>>> there are various alternitives: RPi 5's have a PCIe interface ...
>> I want to have lots of individual drives for backup rotations, for
>> example (I already have loads, but I need some more). I don't want them
>> all to be affected by lightning strikes at the same time, and water
>> damage in the kitchen rarely affects the bedroom. In other words,
>> ideally I would like to have individual enclosures again that only do
>> what they are supposed to do, not a one or two server/s. It may be that
>> these enclosures no longer exist, in which case I will have to switch to
>> something else or work around the problem with a script, gvfs, smartd
>> ... (there is also the problem of software waking up devices that should
>> be left asleep ;).
>>

Cheers, Gene Heskett, CET.
-- 
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
  soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author, 1940)
If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable.
  - Louis D. Brandeis
Don't poison our oceans, interdict drugs at the src.