Reducing my reliance on cloud storage

Feels like you missed the point. How much of a power envelope £11/m buys you is largely irrelevant, anyone can spec a box that will do op’s required workload in 5-6w, but it’s not in any way comparable in terms of resilience or potentially speed to what op’s £11/m is currently providing.



Potentially, but I would suggest you start by diagnosing why sharing from your PC is slow first. Obviously pulling data remotely depends on your servers connection to the router, the upload speed of your connection, the connection between your ISP and wherever the remote device is and the same on the remote side to the client.

The functionality at 5-6 watts would be very limited but the hardware should be cheap as chips though.

It depends how much data the OP might store and what functionality is needed. If the task is to just backup a pair of phones I don’t think I’d bother building a system for that alone. You can buy phone docks that that will perform backups while charging, I think even even phone cases that offers extended battery life too.
 
Do you use an external caddy for extra storage?
That system isn't one I personally use for a NAS, it's one I used to run the majority of my compute off in preference to running it on the storage box. But, as the discussion is related to a stated requirement of 2TB of storage, last I looked, 2TB of NVMe and 2TB of AHCI SATA SSD were cheap, making redundancy simple enough without one.

The functionality at 5-6 watts would be very limited but the hardware should be cheap as chips though.

It depends how much data the OP might store and what functionality is needed. If the task is to just backup a pair of phones I don’t think I’d bother building a system for that alone. You can buy phone docks that that will perform backups while charging, I think even even phone cases that offers extended battery life too.
Not that limited really - an i3 8th gen NUC idles at something stupid like 4w last I looked. I'd expect an N100 to be able to potentially go lower, but we're already well into the realms of diminishing returns, so it's largely pointless in the stated scenario. Low end intel offers a lot of other options, immich or similar for example, automated media management, HA, CCTV and other useful services - we are kind of past the point where a modern NAS is actually just a dumb NAS, man + dog tends to want docker/VM etc..
 
That system isn't one I personally use for a NAS, it's one I used to run the majority of my compute off in preference to running it on the storage box. But, as the discussion is related to a stated requirement of 2TB of storage, last I looked, 2TB of NVMe and 2TB of AHCI SATA SSD were cheap, making redundancy simple enough without one.


Not that limited really - an i3 8th gen NUC idles at something stupid like 4w last I looked. I'd expect an N100 to be able to potentially go lower, but we're already well into the realms of diminishing returns, so it's largely pointless in the stated scenario. Low end intel offers a lot of other options, immich or similar for example, automated media management, HA, CCTV and other useful services - we are kind of past the point where a modern NAS is actually just a dumb NAS, man + dog tends to want docker/VM etc..

CPU power use isn’t much of an issue until you reach the higher performance parts. An ATX PSU will have a parasitic power draw of 10-15~ watts just being powered up. Even more in some units. A single case fan will easily use or watt or so. You can build a system that is truly 5/6- watts but not with off the shelf pc parts. It also need to be used headless and without peripherals.
 
CPU power use isn’t much of an issue until you reach the higher performance parts. An ATX PSU will have a parasitic power draw of 10-15~ watts just being powered up. Even more in some units. A single case fan will easily use or watt or so. You can build a system that is truly 5/6- watts but not with off the shelf pc parts. It also need to be used headless and without peripherals.
Feels a little like you may have skipped the rest of the thread? Nobody other than you has suggested a self build with a ATX PSU and your numbers feel high, op isn't now pursuing this route to 'save' money, a NUC is pretty much as 'off the shelf' as you can get, as is the HP I mentioned, neither uses an ATX PSU, but the power numbers I quoted are real world with OS booted/idle (Ubuntu) on systems that regularly change hands used for less than a functional Pi5 system would cost to buy new. Also while my SC847 does indeed have a 6w draw even when off (fans spin 24/7), something like my Corsair RMX 550 v1 is almost as good as an external power brick/PICO set-up at the low end, and yes, it's perfectly possible to build a 5-6w idle system with off the shelf parts, and that is directly comparable to a basic pi5 which will idle at 4-5w in Ubuntu, I would imagine if you spend/waste the time, you could get both lower and i'm measuring at the wall.
 
Feels a little like you may have skipped the rest of the thread? Nobody other than you has suggested a self build with a ATX PSU and your numbers feel high, op isn't now pursuing this route to 'save' money, a NUC is pretty much as 'off the shelf' as you can get, as is the HP I mentioned, neither uses an ATX PSU, but the power numbers I quoted are real world with OS booted/idle (Ubuntu) on systems that regularly change hands used for less than a functional Pi5 system would cost to buy new. Also while my SC847 does indeed have a 6w draw even when off (fans spin 24/7), something like my Corsair RMX 550 v1 is almost as good as an external power brick/PICO set-up at the low end, and yes, it's perfectly possible to build a 5-6w idle system with off the shelf parts, and that is directly comparable to a basic pi5 which will idle at 4-5w in Ubuntu, I would imagine if you spend/waste the time, you could get both lower and i'm measuring at the wall.

We’re discussing your points which are pretty irrelevant TBH. A NUC will use significantly more than 5-6 watts and more again depending on the functionality. That’s OK though as 10x the power use still works.
 
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We’re discussing your points which are pretty irrelevant TBH. A NUC will use significantly more than 5-6 watts and more again depending on the functionality. That’s OK though as 10x the power use still works.
Given my point was you'd totally missed the point by focusing on how much power you could buy with £11 (and you even managed to get that wrong), I couldn't agree more, in fact all i've done so far is try to politely correct your wildly inaccurate or misguided statements, which oddly brings us to this:

Review of the NUC I mentioned idle at 4.3w
Windows 10, idle on desktop 4.3w

Blog of modern off the shelf items (including an ATX PSU you claim will draw 10-15w) idling at 7w :cry:
i5 12400, 64GB RAM, 1TB SSD 7w

Have fun :)
 
Given my point was you'd totally missed the point by focusing on how much power you could buy with £11 (and you even managed to get that wrong), I couldn't agree more, in fact all i've done so far is try to politely correct your wildly inaccurate or misguided statements, which oddly brings us to this:

Review of the NUC I mentioned idle at 4.3w
Windows 10, idle on desktop 4.3w

Blog of modern off the shelf items (including an ATX PSU you claim will draw 10-15w) idling at 7w :cry:
i5 12400, 64GB RAM, 1TB SSD 7w

Have fun :)

That’s pretty funny. Have you even read that link… So yeah that functionality…
 
Depends what you need to store - photos are small and a free google account will give you 15GB, others offer similar size for zero cost.
For larger local storage, if your router has a USB port (or you could buy one for cheap that does), a 4TB USB drive would only cost around £100.

I'm running a 2nd hand Synology NAS with 2x6TB in RAID1, that cost me about £130 all in (mostly for game recordings etc), although the drives are pretty old. For stuff I absolutely am not willing to lose I'd probably pay for cloud storage, but I can't see me needing beyond a few GB - slow Amazon storage (i.e. S3/glacier) is pretty cheap for small amounts if you don't need to access it often
 
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