After I had two WD drives fail in my old NAS so I switched to all Seagate on my next build. Currently running 9x 20TB Exos X20, though for only about a year now, so no issues should be expected, yet.

I think the most important thing is that you pick a drive that is meant for NAS/server use (so rated for running 24/7). And having manufacturere warrenty is also nice. My Seagate drives have 60 months (which is considerably more then the 36 months that my WD drives had).

Nope, the post doesn’t say.

Who is forcing you?

Chat control wasn’t beat, it was postponed. The proposal will be back.

The reasoning is that drives are produced and shipped in batches and if you order multiple at onces there is a higher chance you’ll get drives from the same batch. If that batch had some fault during production or it was damaged during shipping, all your drives might be affected.

I don’t have a source, but it’s something multiple expirenced people have mentioned to me.

Ah, my bad.

I’m using Synology/DMS and there you have a pretty neat GUI that lists newly detected drives and let’s you assign them to your storage pool and rebuild the raid. I’d expect it to be quite similar on software like TrueNAS Rockstor.

My first question is about different drives. Could I purchase two different brand drives and use them with btrfs? (I assume yes)

You can.

2nd question: how does the replacement process go? Like if drive A died, so I remove it, and put a brand new replacement in. What do I have to do with btrfs to get the raid 1 back going? Any links or guides would be amazing.

Depends on what NAS/Software you have. If your NAS supports hot-swaps you can just pull out the defective drive and plug in another. Otherwise you’ll have to shut it down, swap the drive and turn it back on.

If you have already have the spare drive ready and you have slots availible, you can run a “hot spare”. This way you can even start the raid rebuild if you’re not physically near your NAS (like when a drive fails while you’re on holiday or sm).

I’m running a plex server on my NAS and use plexamp to stream music.

I payed about $350 for my 20TB drives, which at the rate offered here would pay of in less then 3 months. Add some overhead in for a NAS and some extra drives for a raid and it still easily pays of in half a year.

Shitty deal.

Synology has it’s own version of raid5 that can handle your specific disk configuration without any modification:

https://www.synology.com/en-us/support/RAID_calculator?drives=4 TB|4 TB|4 TB|4 TB|2 TB|2 TB&raid=SHR_1|RAID_5

Not sure if similar things are availible on other platforms.

You forgot the VPN.

.mkv is just a container and can contain any encode. All my av1 encodes are .mkv files.

But the majority of my videos are in h264 for compatability, though I’ve been adding more av1 and h265 encodes lateley. But storage isn’t much of a concern for me.

Yeah, no. I’d rather use a clunky website in a browser then installing dozens of specific apps.

Does that mean Teams will finally stop opening links in Edge when that’s not my default browser?

How do you trust the third parties?

How do you trust anyone? At some point you either do or don’t, because it’s just not possible to verify everything in your life.

The alternative would be not using an VPN and for me personally I trust my VPN provider a lot more than my luck of not getting chaught by chance.

you have to have complete trust in the service provider.

Not completley, there is 3rd party audit companies that can verify claims made by the VPN providers, like confirming no-log policy and such.

So install and updated it without going through the store apps … you can download all the installers directly from their website. Absolute non-issue.

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Have you considered converting to AV1 instead of H265?

I have a similar issue with my mac+chrome having to convert H265 -> H264 (even though it should be able to play it), but it has no trouble direct-playing AV1 for some reason.