I found his blog last night(*) - it became apparent quite quickly he wasn't so much interested in solutions, more "how far can I push this before it gets silly". A true engineer.

* while hunting for a Raspberry Pi on a PCIe card, not with a PCIe card - to use as a lights-out controller. No such thing apparently.

With respect from a chartered systems engineer, that's not a typical (or even desirable) attribute of engineers, whose duty is to provide solutions to real problems that are effective, reliable, convenient and efficient.

It approximates closer to the approach of wizards like Wozniak, who are innovators rather than engineers. And we need innovators, but their creations seldom stand any long term test as engineering. The engineers must take over once the innovators have delivered, to refine the concept into a product.

A good Engineer should be both.

Able to build something exactly to spec....

And to look at something like a Raspberry Pi and go "I wonder if....."

Stevenson, Brunel, Watt and the rest all pushed the boundaries of what was possible.

An Engineer is someone who works with engines/structures.

Prototypes are blue-sky thinking and should make people go 'Wow, I did not think that was possible/sane'

Whereas Production should be accurate to the design.

Part of Today's problems is manglement don't know the difference......

" An Engineer is someone who works with engines/structures "

This is a common misapprehension. "Engineer" derives from the same root semantically as "ingenious", not from "engine". Indeed "engine" drives independently from the same root.

This misapprehension has caused every technician and fitter to be miscalled "engineer", and has thus caused great confusion.

In reality, an engineer typically converts ideas and concepts into specifications of realisable deliverables via processes of planning and design, then passes those specifications to technicians to be implemented.

On the other hand, innovators are obliged to undertake the entire end to end process, specifically because everything from the idea to the implementation is likely to be novel. Consequently, the results will commonly be prototypes, rather than finished products.

And part of the engineer's role is to know the limits of the thing they're working with, so they can make sure that the design doesn't reach them.

For some things those limits are well known (eg tensile strength of a specific wire), but in other cases you may have to test to destruction to find those limits. And then design to a maximum of half that limit.

But in this instance, anyone with any Pi experience would be able to tell you that the throughput is far too small for that type of use. You don't have to build it to know that.

I think you are confusing Wozniak with Steve Jobs who made the Mac III such a disaster because he remove the fan because it was too noisy. Wozniak actually made things that worked, it was Steve who just wanted things to be "cool."

If he wanted it to be cool he shouldn't have removed the fan.

" I think you are confusing Wozniak with Steve Jobs

Actually I'm not. Woz was an innovator, Jobs was a marketing wizard.

The design of the Apple II disk interface is an example of what I am referring to. It was cunning in that it avoided the use of an expensive chip, but it was not optimum as it occupied the entire CPU capacity during disk transfers by performing in software all the low level operations that a floppy disk interface chip would have done silently without burdening the CPU. Consequently it was great innovation but not brilliant engineering.

"I found his blog last night ..."

Not a coincidence. His SEO is working perfectly.

A Synology DS420+ goes for around €350. Add 4 [1]8TB SSDs at €830 a pop and you're still €1300 better off and you have a product for which bottlenecks will not occur so often.

I understand what a pet project is, but sometimes you need to look at the cold, hard numbers first.

[1] https://www.ldlc.com/fr-lu/fiche/PB00351657.html

In my experience, I see a lot of fancy/complex IT where a geek said "Oh, look how clever I am" without bothering to ask the fundatmental question of "Should I do this?"

Alternatively, "should I not so this?" is a question to ask.

Sometimes the only reason to not do something is common sense and/or logic. But living by those rules alone makes life boring. Where would we be without people crazy enough to think of controlling a massive explosion and turning it into a way to get into orbit... or to heat up water to spin a turbine to generate electricity?

Should I do this?

Well, if you are Jeff then of course you should, because he is in the business of getting his YouTube videos seen and stuff like this gets attention. He's not out to put a storage server on the market.

And the rest of us who are interested can vicariously enjoy.

And anyone who vaguely thought it might be a good idea can realise such things need a bit more thought, before wasting their own money!

Not surprising really. For all its multiplicity of peripherals, the Pi Compute processor's performance is little better than that of my most ancient (2010) palmtop.

Plus, add on NIC port that can barely do 200Mbps.

The bang for the buck for the Pi is pretty amazing, and it gets by with so little because so many applications need so little.

But storage isn't one of those things.

The Pi 4B is showing an iperf result of 968Mbps over gigabit Ethernet.

The Pi 3B+ wasn't true gigabit but could still do about 300Mbs.

doesn't matter, what matters is publicity. But you can't blame anybody, cause capitalism, etc., eh?

The Pi is useful for lower end, low power server stuff and I/O interfacing.

Recently I've tried using it to replace a Core2Quad Unix desktop with a fanless silent Linux based Pi 4 (sadly BSD on the Pi has unaccelerated Xorg).

I would describe the experience as painful. Raspbian is quite fragile, I see issues with USB that don't appear on an x86 PC, and it's considerably slower than the 2008 era Core2Quad system.

The takeaway so far is 'Windows is far better than this', although to be fair I expect Linux on x64 wouldn't experience all the issues I'm seeing.

Recommendations for silent small x64 boxes welcome.

That last thing that Raspberry Pi OS based on Buster (it hasn't been called Raspbian for ages) is, is "fragile". It's as strong as it needs to be for an educational/experimental system, and that's pretty strong.

The new Bullseye based version needs to mature a bit.

I get along with it just fine for desktop use.

It was done for a bit of fun - I don't see the problem here...

I'm going to set up an, erm... "merch" store for my comments on El Reg and then hawk the url when I post comments. Then I'm going to set up a Patreon page so I can try to convince everyone else to pay for my lifestyle. If that doesn't work, then I guess I'll resort to thumbnails of girls in bikinis to try to lure people in. That seems to be the stock clickbait method on YT when a channel needs to up its stats.

When I bought my project sailboat last year I did actually think of setting up a YT channel to document the renovation. Then I remembered (A) how much I dislike Google, (B) how shit and desperate most of the YT stuff is, (C) that I couldn't actually be arsed and didn't want to be a slave to a camera, and (D) that I don't actually need the money (not that I'd have made much TBH).

Your sailboat reno video needs to include lots of pictures of you in a bikini (recommending you shave your back)

However a Pi with a single disk and Nextcloud is quite a handy domestic server although over the last few releases log-on seems to have got rather slow - or is it just mine? Anyway there's no need to log on very often.

He who has not seen a product and said "I can build a better one and cheaper" and then spent loads more than the original product proving themselves wrong, may cast the first stone.

He who has not seen a product and said "I can build a better one and cheaper" and then spent loads more than the original product proving themselves wrong, may build the trebuchet to cast the first stone. FTFY

Is there any field of engineering that hasn't dreamed of building a Trebuchet?

It might even make control systems bearable

Product development will cost more than the product you are trying to copy, but once you actually develop it, so it meets your requirements and is actually repeatable, then you have a chance at making it cheaper in volume.

He should have added a whole lot of flashy LED strings, doing blinkenlights things without any reason. That would have improved the system's performance. Not in terms of raw speed, but entertainment value while waiting for your data.

And, if all fails, like missing all data, then you can make it shine in a fine red color. See, "performance" is in the eye of the beholder.

Alternatively he could return the drives to Amazon for a refund while earning $$$ through YT ads and referable links while getting lots of free publicity from el'reg

Google Backup and Sync and Microsoft OneDrive are both being upgraded to stop them working on Windows 7 so we'll probably see a lot of people chasing their own cloud storage so that they can keep using it because it doesn't get "upgraded" to stop it working any more.

1, Buy Synology box and stick 4x8tb spinning rust drives in it, go to pub

2, Buy HP microserver tower, install open source build of synology DSM, stick 4x8tb spinning rust drives in it, go to pub an hour later than 1

A video about building a $5000 storage device that works but is slow, isn't too naff. I've watched AvE tear into brand-new, relatively expensive tools in his BOLTR vids, and thought "there's no way he's getting that thing back together and working". And sometimes he doesn't. But I've never begrudged the $5 I donate every month - it's cheap entertainment.