Apolonio Blog

Before I give an update, I want to say that it may be cheaper to buy a purpose built case, I am doing three of these so I got a little bit of that economy of scale going for me. When done I will do a BOM on all this and we can compare.

Why three?

Replacing this monstrosity

Yes that is a Samsung SSD hanging by the friction of the connectors.

And recall this post? https://www.apolonio.com/blog/?p=12520

Here is an updated picture with 16 x 4TB drives

So that is actually two units but considering it one.

Then here is the first one.

Still a few more things to print. On the back interface and HBA it is almost ready

Got the wrong brass inserts though, they are too big, and the ones I had on hand were too small.

Anyway it is coming along, predict it will be done by end of Sunday, maybe not in production but production ready.

Keep getting problems with drive alignment. Had to a custom one with a drive a did a block check.

When I did a pvcreate I had to do this

pvcreate --dataalignment 1m /dev/sdc1

Went swimming today, got a lot done too. Feeling good. But it is late.

I didn’t display it but my lowest weight since I was recording was the data Toto passed, it was 322.4, the next day I was 322.6 I am a pound away at beating those numbers. It is possible to crack 320 by end of Month and an outside chance of cracking 310 by end of year.

Weight: 323.2

Been over a month since Toto left us.

The healing continues though, but seems to moving too slow.

I touched his memorial today, reminded me of him being around.

Life is quiet, not ready for a new dog… yet.

Almost got one last week.

On the daily notes, Seahawks lost, got a bunch cleaned up at home. Got new rack going.

Keeping busy, getting ready for next dog.

Weight: 326.8

I spend hours in this chair I am sitting in. It is not unusual for me to be in my chair for 12 hours in a day. So I looked at some high end chairs

The chair which looks like a gaming chair is over 4k. But I admit it is comfortable. Can’t do it. Too expensive.

• Got a lot of things done today, prior to looking at the chair I continued with fixing failing drives.
• After the chair, went to try woods coffee for the first time, one of the better coffees I have tried.
• Then went to Costco again cause one of my son’s needed to restock.
• After Costco went to get Mexican Fried Ice Cream for my other sone.
• Then went to Lowes to get a new leaf blower for my wife.

Finally got home at about 5:30PM and I tried to get my new JBOD going, but the inserts I got was too small.

I pivoted and got most of my physical drives monitored on my network. Noticed more heat. Heat is the issue.

Haven’t mentioned it but the days I did not swim I did not do 10k steps. Too cold.

Weight: 326.8

Got a bunch drives that a needed to replace, kind of a pain. I finished one on my media center, and my backup server. It was a lot of work to get in to.

I did swim today, got a lot done in the evening, went swim, got meds, got food, picked up my amazon.

Lot of things to do this weekend.

My JBOD server is coming around too.

Weight: 324.6

Last night I had a scare, one of the archive checksums did not match up.

Luckily got backups and it was discovered while I was replacing the hard drives.

One thing I been on lately is checking on the health of my hard drives. I can’t do much for the ESXi hosts, but I can do for the physical hosts especially the linux ones.

I found a couple of bad drives, one in my media center and another one in my filer.

Heat is also an issue so I am putting in monitors for all of that.

Finally, I have not been backing up my desktop since I got it, no drive space left.

I have ordered a couple of hard drives, one to replace the bad drive in my filer another to add media capacity, and finally one to backup my data.

Weight: 325.6

This JBOD backplane came in yesterday from aliexpress. I didn’t have plans for it but it was cheap and was worth a look. Turned out to burn a hole in my wallet.

Has huge promise, got a few things to test it out. Hoping to get it rack mounted this weekend.

Oh yeah need a new rack now.

Looks like this kicks of my 2026 network reorg plans.

Weight: 323.8

Here is another rack I just finished. This one services the living room entertainment area.

Note the Rpi on the top, I am considering using one of the blank areas below for it.

As I was building this, I was thinking about redoing my entertainment media both the front end and the back end.

Seahawks won today, my Windows 11 is mostly built.

Weight: 325.6