skimmilk5

If you're wanting to do GPU transcoding, then yes, this power supply will be helpful. Having the full-height PCIe slots will also be very helpful in that regard. Note that this chassis is not a standard ATX chassis (the rear I/O is fixed to the board, as opposed to having a regular I/O shield). If you do some hunting around on your local Craigslist/FB Marketplace and Ebay, you might be able to find a SuperMicro chassis for way cheaper that has similar expansion with standard ATX. I'd buy used Supermicro, the stuff's built like a tank, and they last for years. Never had an issue buying used Supermicro chassis or boards.

Easiest is if you just mark one of the posts (what you found the most useful). There's a lot of information that would be really difficult to summarize.

Just buy it with the second drive. No use in buying it now.

You'd probably need a second enclosure, to be honest.

You can't Y-split SATA data. You'd need another enclosure and drive, or you can replace just the drive with a larger one and move the data off of the old (smaller) drive onto the new (larger) drive.

Yes, it will. The power button on these types of units tend to be an on/off, rather than a momentary press, so it'll spin up as long as the switch is in the "on" position. One of the beauties of these types of enclosures is they don't mask the data at all. How the drive appears now is how it'll appear later, even if you choose to attach this drive using SATA instead of through a USB dock. The data will all still be there, since the drive format is exactly the same (for example, ext4 or xfs). No, the UUID is tied to the drive, not the drive enclosure, and it cannot be changed. You should be able to use /etc/fstab to mount the volume to whatever directory (/media/lms or something in /mnt) you'd like. Yep, but also keep in mind that the data on this quality of hard drive is relatively safer compared to an archival hard drive. It's actually designed for the workloads that you'll be putting on it without just dying, and if treated well (i.e., not dropped), I've seen these drives last over 7 years.

Does it not occur with a different GPU or if you try onboard graphics?

Take a look at the Hard Drive Enclosures section of Newegg or Microcenter (among others, they aren't the only place to get these from). You'll want something that: Can connect over at least USB 3.0 speeds Supports 3.5" hard drives Is constructed solidly enough to support the weight of the drive As hard drives go, again, search Newegg or Microcenter for Western Digital Red, Seagate Ironwolf, or Toshiba N300. The tier-up versions would be the Western Digital Red Pro and Seagate Ironwolf Pro, and the enterprise versions would be the Western Digital Gold or RE and Seagate Exos. These are also good options, and if you can find them on sale, they sometimes end up being cheaper than the Red or Ironwolf drives. Just make sure the drive is SATA and not SAS.

I'm partial to Peter McKinnon as far as YT creators go. If you want to read about cameras and lenses, Ken Rockwell publishes very extensive and detailed reviews. I've been working in photography for about a decade, but my experience is much more journalistic, so it might not apply to you. Hopefully you can adapt some of these lessons. Nowadays, largely, the camera body itself doesn't really matter. Modern cameras, even at the lower end, have so much technology from their high-end counterparts that they can produce amazing images. Like with everything, the features of the high-end market eventually trickle down to the lower-end: Xeon features trickle down to Core processors, for example. Learning the controls of your camera will do you much better than getting a better camera. Knowing instinctively what to change to achieve the image that you want to get without having to think about it will make your images better. You'll be able to fire off the shot far faster than if you're sitting there, fumbling with the settings, by which point the subject will have moved on. Learn the exposure basics, learn what features of your camera affect the quality, learn what the limitations of your camera's body are (dynamic range, sensitivity limitations, low-light limitations), and actively work against them to find its advantages. Glass matters. A lot. My one key lens (again, minding that I work in sports journalism) is the 70-200mm f/2.8. That lens, while expensive, has the durability to be handled by pros on a daily basis, getting banged around, dropped, rained/snowed/sleeted/hailed on and so much more. It's also a well crafted assembly, featuring a metal construction and quality glass. The performance difference between a $300 lens and a $3000 lens is far larger than the performance difference between a $500 camera body and a $5000 camera body. For travel, I'd probably go wider. Somewhere in the 14-85mm range is a good place to look for focal length (essentially, the zoom). The pro-level versions would be the 14-24mm f/2.8 and the 24-70 f/2.8. Find something in these ranges (the kit lens with many entry-level cameras is an 18-55mm f/5.6) and learn what its focal length characteristics are and how it handles. Your photographic style might be conducive to using prime lenses (lenses that only focus, their focal length is locked). A quality 35mm, 50mm, and 85mm set isn't too expensive, but these lenses are incredibly versatile and produce very, very sharp images. Brand doesn't matter (as much). Where possible, I like to stick to first-party lenses (rather than the third-party Sigma, Tamron, or Rokinon lenses). They maintain their value better and don't experience nearly the same number of "weird" issues. However, the debate between Canon/Nikon/Sony/Fujifilm/Panasonic/insert-other-brand-here isn't really as big as some people make it out to be. That being said, many photographers will stick to what they started with, and their entire collection of equipment will be from a single brand. The pieces will all play nice with each other, and the controls and feel of the cameras and lenses will be familiar. Front lens caps can sod off. They get in the way and are generally just a nuisance. The only place for a front lens cap is when a lens is going back in the bag. Don't keep lens caps in your pocket or attached to your camera. Just leave them in the bag. Rear lens caps and body caps are far more important. Keep the inside of your camera clean, and always cover when not actively switching. Lens hoods are a good idea. Not so much for flares, but simply for impacts to the front of the lens and to protect the front element. If you have the camera over your shoulder as you're traveling, you'll bang the front of the lens around naturally. The lens hood will take a lot of those impacts and break before the lens does.

Ah, perfect! Apologies for misunderstanding! In that case, I think you're sorted if you choose to switch out that dying external drive with one that can actually handle the server-like load. Since you seem pretty intent on it, I believe that your best option is to get a quality external drive enclosure and put a NAS-grade hard drive into it. This way, you get to keep your existing mini PC, but you get the durability of a proper hard drive. How does that sound?

I'm going to assume you mean TB instead of GB when referring to your storage drives... Anyways, my suggestion would be to switch chassis all together. Something like the Supermicro CSE-825 or Supermicro CSE-826 can accept 8 or 12 drives (respectively), and its power supply will be able to actually power those drives without needing any weird cabling. The fans in these units aren't necessarily loud or annoying, they're just audible. I've always found them to be a gentle hum (especially given that they're 80mm instead of 40mm). Both of these chassis allow you to install up to a full size ATX motherboard, though I've found in personal experience that a MATX motherboard fits a little bit better. You'd essentially transplant all of your hard drives and motherboard/CPU/RAM/cooler into the new chassis. The Supermicro boards that the power supply was made for have the power connectors on one edge closest to the power supply (look up the Supermicro X11SSL for an example of what this looks like), so you might need a 24-pin extension and/or an 8-pin extension, but mind that these are extensions, not splitters. Now'd also be a great time to move away from SATA cables, since the backplanes in both of these chassis supports connectivity over SAS. You can drive SATA drives over SAS cabling, but the cabling's way neater, since each SAS cable can actually handle up to 4 drives in its barest of forms. Something like the LSI HBA 9300-8i has the ability to host-bus adapt 8 drives using two MiniSAS HD to MiniSAS cables. The backplanes are generally prewired for power over 4-pin Molex, so that's sorted, nice and easy.

That's actually not a half-bad idea that I didn't think of. It doesn't solve the problem of the existing drive having poor health (or the computer reporting the drive as "damaged"), but it's a good step in the right direction. If you're going to take that route, I think the best course of action would to get a new hard drive to replace the existing internal hard drive. This will be a 2.5" commodity consumer hard drive (the smaller, laptop-size drives) like a WD Blue or Seagate Barracuda. You can then attach an external USB drive dock with a NAS hard drive like a WD Red or Seagate Ironwolf.

I would not do this in one swoop. I'd rebuild the array fully, first. Right now, you're in a vulnerable state, and you want to get out of that vulnerable state as soon as you can to lessen the chance of losing data. Because both your 6TB and 8TB drives are being used for parity, removing one with an already failed drive will result in all of the data on your failed drive being lost. As to the steps you've outlined to replace a drive, your procedure is correct.

Sure! HBAs can look confusing on the surface, but they're actually pretty simple devices. HBAs simply turn a PCIe slot into a bunch of SATA or SAS ports that you can plug drives into. They have a controller on the card, but this controller's only purpose is to interface the drives to the rest of the system invisibly. Unlike a RAID card, a HBA does not touch the data on the drive at all, so it'll appear to the system just like if you plugged the drive into the motherboard. In fact, the on-board SATA ports are driven using a HBA! There are two families of HBAs: SATA HBA cards and SAS HBA cards. SATA HBA cards are compatible only with SATA drives, while SAS HBA cards can normally be plugged into a SATA drive or a SAS drive. (Please note that this doesn't always hold true, and you should check the datasheet of a SAS HBA to make sure it can accept SATA drives before buying it!) SATA HBAs can have either a bunch of single SATA ports on them (the ones that look like the ones on your motherboard), or they can be outfitted with a MiniSAS HD connector. A MiniSAS HD connector, despite its name, can accept up to four drives on it using a MiniSAS HD to 4x SATA breakout cable. Some backplanes also have a MiniSAS HD connector on them, so you can just use a MiniSAS HD to MiniSAS HD cable for tider cable management. You might also see the MiniSAS HD connector referred to as SFF-8643. SAS HBAs typically have MiniSAS (also referred to as SFF-8087, not to be confused with MiniSAS HD) or MiniSAS HD connectors on them. Both can be connected to either breakout cables to go directly into drives or standalone cables (MiniSAS to MiniSAS, or MiniSAS HD to MiniSAS HD) to go into a backplane. Like mentioned above, they can typically accept a SATA or a SAS drive. Taking a look at your SilverStone chassis, the RM21-308 appears to have compatibility for either SATA drives using the standard SATA connector or SAS using a SFF-8087 (MiniSAS) connector. What this means is that you can use two MiniSAS HD to MiniSAS cables to connect to your HBA; just two cables can service eight drives. The LSI SAS 9300-8i has two MiniSAS HD ports on it, and they can be had for quite cheaply nowadays. LSI's naming scheme has four numbers (the model), followed by a number (the number of drives supported in total) and a letter (i for internal ports, e for external ports). Regardless of the HBA you choose, make sure that it has MiniSAS HD ports on it, not MiniSAS ports. On the datasheet, you can see that it supports up to eight SATA or SAS drives with its two MiniSAS HD ports. To install it, you'll install the HBA into your motherboard, then plug in the MiniSAS HD end of your cable to the HBA. Plug the other MiniSAS end of the cable into your chassis backplane. Repeat for the other cable. For finding used HBAs, eBay is your friend; these cards are commonly liquidated from enterprises, especially from large datacenters who are removing their fleets of SAS drives and replacing them with PCIe storage at great expense. Hopefully this helps!

The question is whether the pcie_2 slot is running off of PCIe lanes from the CPU or from the chipset. If it is running off of PCIe lanes from the chipset, I'd rather have it on pcie_1 at 8x. Keep in mind, slot and the finger might be shaped like PCIe x16 (and might even be wired electrically for x16), but that does not mean that they'll operate at PCIe x16. That's why @RONOTHAN## said that the card will operate at x8 speeds, even if it's plugged into a x16 slot. It's only using 8 of the lanes.