Did you put a SATA card in it?
Two, in fact. For whatever reason, SW RAID performance absolutely stunk when both drives were on the same card. A second cheapie card, flashed to be Mac-friendly, was the easiest solution. I suspect driver problems, but there's a limit to how much work I want to put in to save on a $5 card! The only thing I did not get was the ability to use the TM GUI on the server itself to restore from its own TM backups to the shared RAID. That is due to video card limitations, and by unwillingness to spend big bucks to get one of the rare cards that would work. If I need to restore, I'll just copy manually from the archive. It's idiotic that the TM GUI requires high-end animation support, but it does. Would have been dirt-simple to have a slow mode in the app, that maybe ditched the animated starfield, or whatever it was that drove it to there in the first place.
I wonder how low you could go with a Raspberry Pi (or Banana Pi if you want more horsepower) and external drive enclosure.
Pretty low, I'd guess. In my case I already had the surprisingly low-power Sawtooth, and all the SW was already there in OSX 10.5, a nearly zero investment in figuring out how to make it do what I wanted. (Hosting Time Machine from all our household Macs, reliably, was an absolute requirement.) A Pi-based system would be good, the rotating disks would be spun down 99% of the time. But I would have spent _much_ more time getting it going, and would have needed something to house and power the disks. (And the Pi.) We don't have any exposed Linux machines in the house, sticking with OSX for everything makes sense. Another $20 got me another complete Sawtooth off of Craigslist to serve as a spare, should I have problems. That's hard to beat.
No need for an inverter, using 12v should save a fair amount of overhead.
It would, but you still would have to power the disks. They don't eat 12V directly. (Not exclusively, anyhow.)
It's getting to the point where the charge controller is more expensive than the panel.
You don't really need a charge controller if you don't have to maximize the power transfer from the panel to the battery. A voltage regulator would do it! If a 25% bigger panel covers the inefficiency, and is cheaper than the controller, well... -- Jim _______________________________________ http://www.okiebenz.com To search list archives http://www.okiebenz.com/archive/ To Unsubscribe or change delivery options go to: http://mail.okiebenz.com/mailman/listinfo/mercedes_okiebenz.com All posts are the result of individual contributors and as such, those individuals are responsible for the content of the post. The list owner has no control over the content of the messages of each contributor.
