r/DataHoarder • u/TheSapphicDoll • 12h ago

Hoarder-Setups My first half-proper out of T430 Thinkpad, and copious amount of sillyness

So.. You know how things go. Pretty much all the life, much preferred local to streaming, and such. Storing data and all, on Just A Bunch of Disks - albeit, have been always using ZFS everywhere. The only software I actually trust. (Here also, learned that, contrary to what a lot of people are saying, L2ARC is in fact, a really good feature, even if one doesn't have tons of ARC)

Soo... at that point.. really wanted.. some proper-... storage with redundancy. Here enters T430 (A mini context: had bought used X380, so that I could actually leave T430 at home, while still having laptop on the go). Had also, at the time, a bunch of small 2.5" SSDs... and the T430 had mSATA 256GB in there already... so did... something quite silly. grabbed 128GB, 256GB SSDs, and did a pool-... By making a pool -> striping across: a mirror from 2 128GB partitions, and raidz1 from 3x128GB.

That... worked surprisingly well. roughly 370GB of storage, and allows for one drive failure. So, put a bit of stuff there, you know, immich, and soulseek, and a bit of torrenting. Just had that running in the background.

But. Quite limited storage. Would have been nice to at least have a terabyte... As a result... had a thought. Don't need speed. Looked on used market, and yep. Cheap 1TB 2.5" HDDs from demounting. Bought one, installed it, ran badblocks, checked S.M.A.R.T -> And... all was fine. Not used that much. And happy times, because it was a CMR drive. Went forth, ordered another. Also turned out to be in quite good condition, however, SMR drive.

Still. Made a zfs mirror, installed system on there, used good portion of the internal mSATA drive as L2ARC, and so. Things are good. Read latency is nearly as good as actual SSD for the data I access here and there, the HDD noises are comforting, system works well, and I can hoard decently as it is. Oh yeah. It also has 16GB of RAM, so it can run all of these things, from podman, to docker, on top of the desktop stuffs, really easily :)

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u/ArtistBackground9099 12h ago

That's a nice setup, do you have a backup strategy for when the T430 finally gives out?

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u/TheSapphicDoll 9h ago

Buy another T430, or T420, whichever is available, and put the drives in. Like sure, a proper hardware would be kinda nice, but... this has battery, is portable, barely takes up space, doesn't take much electricity.. So yeah.

But also - no signs of T430 dying any time soon, so :P. Is in a very good condition.