Aw man, every midrange phone that would be interesting comes with MediaTek SOCs. I should check if the custom rom scene is still dead for phones with MT chips… Do they still withold the sources needed for rom developement?

An interesting take, and not very popular among the other comments, but I suppose you have your experiences and reasons to say this.

As I mentioned RAID is on the table, no problem with that. It is kind of the point to have a safer, more centralized storage for important stuff, and space for keeping media.

Speed wouldn’t be a concern. Noise is, since my apartment is very small. And reliability over time would be. Especially power cycles, or spin down - spin up events. I figured if I used SSDs, I could leave the whole rig powered on 24/7 But with HDDs I think I would probably need to turn the system off for the night.

Correct me if I am wrong about enterprise grade SSDs, but if I have the power on time and the TBW values for the drives along with the manufacturing date, ones with reasonable combination of those could be bought for a reasonable price. After some testing they could also be trusted. At what point would you expect an SSD like this to last some years in a home server environment? I am not an expert but with some pointers this should be easy to figure out, which is why I am asking.

I don’t plan to neglect backups. Currently I use Syncthing as well, but only between non-redundant storage locations, so I have duplicates. Like phone pushes photos to pc or laptop, those sync them between each other. Important docs that I can’t lose are also on all 3 devices.

And I plan to keep the local storage of mission critical data around on some clients at least. I just want to have a central, more robust, redundant system where one or 2 disks can fail without my data being gone or corrupted.

Thanks for the insights on the case and drives!

I have an old Silverstone case with about 6 of the old style 3,5" drive mounts and 3x5,25" bay. Originally I had a Samsung 1TB drive in it (which is still kicking around somehow pulling torrent drive duty) I remember it being louder in that case then in my new one. So I’ll have to test it out. If i can get my hands on some rubber bearings and if they help any at all.

I am not planning to go that big on storage for now tho. It sounds like serious work. I am doing this so I can be more comfortable. Aside from updates, I want to dial it in once and forget it unless I need to touch it.

The noise is only an issue because of how small my appartment is. I can’t really isolate noise in here. I would think it also depends on which drives I get. I read that some are louder than others.

redmi note 9 pro user here. Now on LOS. The default OS is full of telemetry. Even the calculator wants you to agree to personal data being used. Would avoid unless you only want the hardware and the model you want has active community rom support.

Also the Bootloader unlocking process is a PITA. You need a xiaomi account logged in to the phone for it for 2 weeks, then they may allow unlocking the BL but only through their unlocker app that frankly sucks. You may have to sit through the wait period twice if something goes wrong. Ask me how I know.

Sadly the voting with wallet approach is only a short term solution imo.

One big player makes the contraversial move, gets some flack then most people forgets. Other players later make the same moves saying this is industry standard now, since the big players are doing it.

Playing the system by workarounds, root hiding, sandboxing tools etc. Will probably work temporarily also until they figure out what people are doing to circumvent the locks.