You can grab a Pi kit for about $70 and I'm wondering if that would work for your Minio server? Do you think it would have enough CPU power to work?
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Well, you can try. At a minimum you'll have some good old geeky fun. And you can use the 'Pi for other things, such as running your own VPN, which can be very nice if you visit places that block known commercial VPN services.
The big slam against the 'Pi is its Ethernet implementation, which remains siamesed onto their USB2 bus even on their newest models. So networking throughput is severely bottlenecked, and this is a networking-centric application. Plus any USB drives will be sharing that puny USB2 bus with each other and with the networking. ...I have a few spare 'PIs lying around but decided against trying this with them.
So my original choice for this was a Libre Computing Renegade card, which is marketed as a more powerful Raspberry 'Pi and fits the same cases, etc. It has true Gbit Ethernet and USB3. So I bought one... alas, a wasted $45. Its software is very poorly architected and its community is pretty useless. Its Linux kernel is compiled in a way that vital functionality is missing, requiring the user to recompile the kernel with additional modules as needed. And one of the modules missing is needed for running Docker, which is the container Minio resides in in my implementation. Sorry, there are limits to how geektastic I'm willing to get.
Plus, with the a card like the 'Pi or Renegade, you need a keyboard, mouse, monitor, HDMI cable and power supply. The refurb Acer starts to look like a bargain considering all that, and it's a tidy package. It will reside inside our family-room entertainment center, with the drives tucked into a vertical folder organizer alongside it.
Note: Unlike the 'Pi's hobbled Ethernet port, the Chromebook has no Ethernet port at all, but that's easily solved with a $15 Gbit Ethernet dongle like the TrendNet unit I chose on Amazon (which advertises Linux compatibility and is indeed plug and play). You could do everything over WiFi of course.
Note: regardless of your choice, you will need a
powered USB hub (preferably USB3) for the disk drives (and Ethernet adaptor).
Right now I'm stress testing the setup (which I call miniminio ...a 'Pi-based version would be a microminio I guess) and it's using 3 of the 4 GB of the Chromebook's RAM, but only a little CPU, typically 5% with bursts to no more than 20% or so; the entire system is running in typically less than 25% CPU utilization and remains responsive for browsing, ssh, etc. Impressive. I'm using the Cockpit utility (
https://cockpit-project.org) to keep an eye on things via Safari on my Mac:
It has been a true Linux geekxperience, which is not a bad thing if you have a grey weekend day to spend fiddling. As with all things Linux, unless you're an experienced sysadmin you'll spend stupid amounts of time doing basic stuff like formatting the disks and figuring out how to get your backup data going to a persistent folder so it doesn't vanish when you reboot or something. It will all make you appreciate the Macintosh experience all the more!
But once running, Linux is amazingly powerful and robust. My past Linux playpens have run for literal years between reboots.
Bottom line: As of this moment my Mac's 1TB drive is about 20% backed up to my miniminio since I started it stress-testing last night. I'd neglected to turn off the auto-suspend power setting, so at some point the miniminio went to sleep, too. It woke right up and resumed this morning, no problem.
I'm feeling optimistic this might actually work! And I never thought I'd be impressed with a Celeron machine, but this one is actually not bad.
One caveat: the ability to run Linux is not guaranteed on Chromebooks. See
https://platypusplatypus.com/chromebooks/5-best-chromebooks-for-linux/ and similar discussions regarding the topic. I got lucky with my choice and wish I'd been forewarned.
All in all, I'd rather Apple deliver a reliable LAN-friendly Time Machine solution that delivers on the promise of the Airport Extreme, but this'll do. As a layer in my backup strategy, it will fit nicely. But unless you're a real expert I wouldn't rely on it for mission-critical backups without a lot of testing and validation first.