Hardware on heezy.blog

Swapping a Drive in a 10-Year-Old FreeNAS Box

Sun, 19 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

My Freenas box is one of those things that I don’t touch unless I need to add capacity or if I pop a drive. Over the years, this box was built from old Nutanix drives, and old web filter chassis, and even a set of four hand me down drives that had been spinning in someone else’s array for 8+ years before I used them. After popping a drive every 3 months for a year or two, I was running out of spares, and patience. So I started replacing them over the past six years, to expand capacity and finally make this thing a reliable piece of hardware that I could count on to hold my stuff.

Recently I purged about 4TB of media. And although I have about 6TB free of 42TB, I wish it was more. I figured with everything going on in the world with increasing costs for global electronic goods, I decided I would replace the last two ancient drives, before they become unavailable, or even more costly (hint: I was right, the price on the new drives just jumped $80 in a single month).

Today, this array consists of:

2x 4TB hand-me-down Nutanix (Seagate and HGST, free)
2x 4TB WD Red (bought new in January 2020, $100 each, 40GB per dollar)
2x 14TB Seagate Ironwolf ($247 each November 2022, 56GB per dollar)
2x 20TB WD Red ($270 each July 2023, 74GB per dollar)

The only affordably priced drives, with the capacity I needed were 16TB Seagate Ironwolf. I am not a big fan of Seagate, considering my anecdotal experience with them outside of my array, but the price point and availability were a big factor. WD Reds were outside my budget, and so these were the only drives I could find that I could get within a month.

And even more of a pain in the ass, the limit for both Amazon and NewEgg were one per address, but fortunately both had the same model in stock. So I bought them.

$379 each, 42GB per dollar. Looking back at my pricing and purchase history, I purchased larger drives every time, which gives you better value for your dollar, but the fact I just bought 32TB of disks for 42GB per dollar, that is like I was buying them back in 2020 in the smallest sizing possible.

Giving a 2012 Mac Mini a Second Life with Debian and XFCE

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I had a 2012 Mac Mini sitting in a drawer. Apple stopped supporting it years ago, macOS ran like garbage on it, and it had been collecting dust. I put Debian 12 with XFCE on it, swapped the spinning disk for an SSD I already had, and now it’s my kid’s Minecraft machine.

Vendor Relationships and Free Enterprise Gear

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

If you work in enterprise IT long enough, vendor sales reps will give you free hardware. They’re not doing it out of kindness. They’re doing it because getting their gear into your environment is how they close deals, and giving you a demo unit or letting you keep eval hardware costs them nothing compared to the support contracts and renewals they’re chasing.

A Dumpster-Bound R710 That Ran for Another 8 Years

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In 2017, I was doing a job at a motorcycle dealership during maintenance hours. One of those loud, overpriced, American-branded, made-in-Mexico free-rider-problem motorcycle dealers with a sticker cost that would make you believe it was an ass-wiping robot. A motorcycle dealer doesn’t need much from a systems perspective, but they need the typical things. Networking, storage, servers. We were pulling out a bunch of old servers and switch equipment as part of a refresh on sales-and-vendor-recommended support schedules, and my peer Joe told me to throw them away. I asked if I could have one instead. He said yes.

The Budget Home Datacenter

Thu, 05 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

🚧 UNDER CONSTRUCTION 🚧 This post is a work in progress. Photos are being added. Some sections are incomplete. And some photos are just wrong

This is the physical side of the homelab. Not the software, not the automation, not the Kubernetes cluster. The actual rack, the wiring, the hardware, and the questionable carpentry that holds it all together.

Cheap NVMe, Dead Talos, and How I Ended Up on MicroK8s

Thu, 15 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I wanted to experiment with Kubernetes on a budget. The rules:

Five nodes
Intel QuickSync-compatible processors for hardware transcoding
As cheap as possible

I found a bulk refurb reseller and bought five Lenovo ThinkCentres off the used market.

The Storage Array

Wed, 15 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Storage in the lab is split between two systems: the FreeNAS box for bulk media over NFS, and Longhorn on the k8s nodes for application config and state. They serve different purposes and don’t overlap.

The FreeNAS Box: 10 Years of Spinning Rust

Fri, 10 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The SuperMicro FreeNAS box is the oldest continuously running piece of infrastructure in the lab. It predates the FortiGate, the k8s cluster, the Proxmox hypervisor, and every automation tool I’ve ever set up. It just sits there, serves NFS, and doesn’t complain.