Would you consider making the LLM/GPU monster server as a gaming desktop? Depends on how you plan to use it, you could have a beast gaming PC than can do LLM/stable diffusion stuff when not gaming. You can install loads of AI stuff on windows, arguably easier.
I’ve been using pcloud. They do one time upfront payments for ‘lifetime’ cloud storage. Catch a sale and it’s ~$160/TB. For something long term like backups it seems unbeatable. To the point I sort of don’t expect them to actually last forever, but if they last 2-3 years it’s a decent deal still.
Use rclone to upload my files, honestly not ideal though since it’s meant for file synchronisation not backups. Also they are dog slow. Downloading my 4TBs takes ~10 days.
My 10 year old ITX NAS build with 4 HDDs used 40W at idle. Just upgraded to an Aoostart WTR Pro with the same 4 HDDs, uses 28W at idle. My power bill currently averages around US$0.13/kWh.
Oh boy you’re gonna love Seal https://github.com/JunkFood02/Seal
ZFS doesn’t have fsck because it already does the equivalent during import, reads and scrubs. Since it’s CoW and transaction based, it can rollback to a good state after power loss. So not only does it automatically check and fix things, it’s less likely to have a problem from power loss in the first place. I’ve used it on a home NAS for 10 years, survived many power outages without a UPS. Of course things can go terribly wrong and you end up with an unrecoverable dataset, and a UPS isn’t a bad idea for any computer if you want reliability.
Totally agree about mainline kernel inclusion, just makes everything easier and ZFS will always be a weird add-on in Linux.
Consider something like the aoostar R1 with Intel N100. Small and low power like a commercial consumer NAS but cheaper and you can chuck whatever OS you want.