[TriLUG] In search of the right hardware: efficent storage edition

[Jack Hill via TriLUG]

Greetings,

Inspired by the recent threads [0][1][2][3] about hardware, I'd like to 
share my quest to find the right devices for me.

Some years ago, my household herd of computing boxen consisted of a legacy 
non x86 systems of various stripes from turn of the millennium. They 
included both workstations and rack mount servers. I had a lot of fun with 
them. In fact, I suspect that there was more fun to be had, but as those 
systems became longer in the tooth, the Free Software community's interest 
waned, and I traveled through life's changes, I decided to part ways and 
look for something that was quieter and less energy intensive to run.

Given the age of those systems, I wasn't too worried about computing 
power, but I did want something that could support four or more disks. A 
promising option appeared to be GnuBee PC-1 [4]. Having no fans, it was 
certainly quiet. However, being based on an embedded router 
system-on-chip, it is best supported by embedded router distributions, and 
I wanted to run the same system that I run elsewhere, which is currently 
GNU Guix. A Guix port isn't out of the question, but that's a longer term 
project, and the supply of more capable MIPS systems for development is 
poor.

However, I've recently found another computer that looks like it will fit 
the bill for me. It's the Ten64[5], which is an 8-core aarch64 system with 
pcie with a 10W typical power consumption for the SoC. 32 GiB memory is 
more than I'm used to, but given that my daily use computer, and old 
ThinkPad (hopefully soon to be replaced with a Reform [6]), is memory 
constrained that could be nice. A downside is that the networking requires 
non-free firmware. However, the documentation of the system seems nice, so 
I'm optimistic. Their crowdfunding campaign wraps up in a couple of days. 
They're over 90% of the way there, so I hope they make it!

I hope you enjoyed this tale. I'm happy to entertain any thoughts or 
suggestions for systems that I've overlooked.

[0] https://trilug.org/pipermail/trilug/Week-of-Mon-20201019/079779.html
[1] https://trilug.org/pipermail/trilug/Week-of-Mon-20201116/079834.html
[2] https://trilug.org/pipermail/trilug/Week-of-Mon-20201109/079826.html
[3] https://trilug.org/pipermail/trilug/Week-of-Mon-20201102/079820.html
[4] http://gnubee.org/
[5] https://www.crowdsupply.com/traverse-technologies/ten64
[6] https://www.crowdsupply.com/mnt/reform

Best,
Jack
--
KM4MBG
xmpp: jackhill at hcoop.net
he/him/his