johnwhelan
Well-known member
I have a number of computers lying around that do different things. I dabbled with a Raspberry Pi 4 for a while, using an external SSD at least it was somewhere I could dump files to move from one system to another but I found it was not quite as user friendly as I'd like and much of the software was older versions which weren't secure. It acted as a file server and ran qbittorent. However you can't add memory and they do have limitations.
Dell refurbished have i5 8th generation desktops floating around. The price seems to vary from hour to hour so rather than buy Raspberry pi 5 I brought a 5060 SSF desktop with win 10. The price difference was quite small by the time you factor in heat sinks, SSD drives, power supplies etc. The 5060 machines upgrade to win 11 quite easily although you may have to turn TPM 2 on in the bios, and came with a CD drive which meant I could rip CDs into .opus format to play on my smartphone.
They also will boot from a NMVe SSD so that gave a reliable hard drive with low power consumption which meant I could leave it on all the time. Some have an SSD in them anyway but my really cheap one didn't so Crucial then Crucial's acronis software to clone the hard drive.
Amazon has some used HGST enterprise 10 TB hard drives that are 5 years old but they are data centre drives for $80 so they should last another 5 years at least. 10 TB has plenty of room to back up half a dozen machines.
I dropped one into a Ugreen external USB to SATA box then let it format for two days. Created a share, don't forget to go into security tab on the drive and let everyone in. The advantage is you can turn the the power off on the Igreen enclosure so if you do get hit with encrypting Malware it doesn't affect the data on the drive.
Now I can do backups across the network. The first laptop backed up quite quickly to 97% and then it sat there. I checked on the 5060 and it was still trickling onto the drive. Two hours later it had successfully backed up across the network. For laptops you might want to go into the sleep settings and say don't go to sleep when plugged in.
If you're feeling rich Dell often drop in a single memory stick rather than two. So pullout the 8 gig memory stick and drop in a pair of 16 gigs sticks. Upgrading to 32 gigs of 3200 memory was cheaper than 16 gigs of 2666 memory by the way. Occasionally I have got way with adding a second 8 gig stick and got dual channel however it's best to drop in a matched pair.
Cheerio John
Dell refurbished have i5 8th generation desktops floating around. The price seems to vary from hour to hour so rather than buy Raspberry pi 5 I brought a 5060 SSF desktop with win 10. The price difference was quite small by the time you factor in heat sinks, SSD drives, power supplies etc. The 5060 machines upgrade to win 11 quite easily although you may have to turn TPM 2 on in the bios, and came with a CD drive which meant I could rip CDs into .opus format to play on my smartphone.
They also will boot from a NMVe SSD so that gave a reliable hard drive with low power consumption which meant I could leave it on all the time. Some have an SSD in them anyway but my really cheap one didn't so Crucial then Crucial's acronis software to clone the hard drive.
Amazon has some used HGST enterprise 10 TB hard drives that are 5 years old but they are data centre drives for $80 so they should last another 5 years at least. 10 TB has plenty of room to back up half a dozen machines.
I dropped one into a Ugreen external USB to SATA box then let it format for two days. Created a share, don't forget to go into security tab on the drive and let everyone in. The advantage is you can turn the the power off on the Igreen enclosure so if you do get hit with encrypting Malware it doesn't affect the data on the drive.
Now I can do backups across the network. The first laptop backed up quite quickly to 97% and then it sat there. I checked on the 5060 and it was still trickling onto the drive. Two hours later it had successfully backed up across the network. For laptops you might want to go into the sleep settings and say don't go to sleep when plugged in.
If you're feeling rich Dell often drop in a single memory stick rather than two. So pullout the 8 gig memory stick and drop in a pair of 16 gigs sticks. Upgrading to 32 gigs of 3200 memory was cheaper than 16 gigs of 2666 memory by the way. Occasionally I have got way with adding a second 8 gig stick and got dual channel however it's best to drop in a matched pair.
Cheerio John