My old server is a bit long in the tooth. It is an old laptop which I partitioned and put Ubuntu on the second partition. It only has 500GB, and, well, it has started creaking at the seams.
- Backups stopped working a while back – some kind of permissions thing, which I never figured out.
- It always boots to Windows and is a pain to reboot into Ubuntu.
- It is a laptop so needs to be permanently open – it’s under and old pillow container to keep the dust out.
- It is an old computer so is very slow – takes about a minute just to start up.
- But twice now it has frozen. When I restarted it, it had a disk error.
This last issue was the one that triggered me to find something new.
New Solution Requirements
- Simple – maybe I am not always here to manage it. The family need to be able to.
- New – this must last at least 10 years.
- Future-proof. We need the flexibility to apply more storage over time.
I thought that a NAS would tick most of the boxes. Some of the modern NAS servers are designed for home and are easy to maintain.
UGREEN
I chose a UGREEN 2 Bay as it seemed to tick all the boxes. Also on reviews people mentioned that it was one of the quieter servers. Setting it up was well documented and didn’t take a lot of understanding to complete. Both the webpage and the app are easy to navigate. I am really happy with it all round.
Noisy
But I was not prepared for it to be so noisy. I know servers are noisy, but it quickly migrated to a cupboard at the back of the house. It is still noisy there so we came up with an ingenious solution.
Its own private muffler! A two pack of kitchen paper towels. and of course they are snowman paper towels – have you seen the theme of this blog
☃️
