The enclosure that lied about its fan
A four-bay box reported 1400 rpm for three months while the fan was, in fact, stationary. What finally gave it away was a 9 °C spread between the top and bottom drive.
Notes from a two-shelf lab
I keep a small rack in a hallway cupboard: two mini-PCs, a four-bay enclosure and far too many cables. This is where I write down what broke, what the fix was, and how much the electricity bill moved. No newsletter, no comments.
Recent entries
Copy speed is not the number you care about
Sequential writes look wonderful on a spec sheet. My restores are thousands of small files, so I started timing those instead. The ranking changed completely.
Three years of the same cheap UPS
It has swallowed eleven brownouts and one genuine outage. The battery is now down to roughly four minutes, which is still two minutes more than a clean shutdown needs.
What lives here
| Role | Machine | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Files | Mini-PC, 16 GB | Four spinning drives, mirrored pairs |
| Scratch | Mini-PC, 8 GB | Nightly rsync target, then off |
| Off-site | A friend's attic | One drive, swapped every visit |
Everything is plain rsync and systemd timers. I tried
three fancier tools and went back each time.