I have a significant investment in my WSLv2 Ubuntu 22.04.3 LTS installation. It has my Nvidia GPU setup nicely integrated and several machine learning demos and tests I’ve built and use for keeping current on machine learning. With Ubuntu 24.04 LTS released, I now want to play around in the newer version but don’t want to move or worse copy my entire set of models and repositories across. I have well over 500Gb of content and absolutely don’t want two copies of those floating around. I’m looking for a solution to this and figure others have encountered it.

We live in a world with a penny ($0.01 USD) per GB of storage. I just found this bare drive MDD (MD20TS25672NAS) 20TB 7200 RPM 256MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5” Internal Hard Drive (for NAS, Network Storage) - 5 Years Warranty (Renewed) for $199.99 USD. I also found Avolusion PRO-X USB 3.0 External Hard Drive (Black) - 2 Year Warranty (20TB) for $229.99 $219.99 USD with the USB C enclosure.

I’ve got a backlog of posts I want to do on various topics. A couple of recent posts, I figured getting out something rough was better than not getting it out and just posted something that felt like it needed another draft or two. I’ll likely review those quickly posted items and update them as time permits.

I am in the process of building a Proxmox 8 Cluster with Ceph in an HA (high availability) configuration using very low-end hardware and questionable options for the various hardware buses. I’m going for HA, cheapfrugal and reuse of hardware that I’ve gathered up over the years.

Over the COVID lockdown, I was running a Plex Media Server (PMS) on an older Dell Optiplex 390 SFF Desktop that I cobbled into it several Seagate USB3 portable drives that I just slapped on it as I needed more space. It hosted my extensive VHS, DVD and BluRay library as I ripped them into digital formats. To improve the experience I threw a Nvidia Quadro P400 into the mix and a PCIe USB3 card for faster access to the drives. Eventually, I had some drive issues and wanted to get some additional reliability into the mix so tried out Microsoft Windows Storage Spaces (MWSS). Windows and the associated fun I had with MWSS left me incredibly frustrated and I was trying to make an enterprise product work in a low-end workstation with a bunch of USB drives. The thing that made me fully abandon MWSS was the recovery options when you had a bad drive. MWSS probably works well with solid enterprise equipment but was misery on the stuff I cobbled together. So exit Windows OS.

For about ten (10) years, I had run an VMWare ESXi server that let me play with new technology and host some content and services. I let it go awhile back while I was in graduate school and working full-time but have missed this as an option ever since. So adding a homelab server or cluster will let me get some of that back.