The easiest way might be getting an ITX board with N100/150 from CWWK or Topton. They usually come with 4-6 SATA ports and the CPU soldered on. Then you just buy your favorite case and plug in your drives. Excluding the cost of the drives you might end up spending about $250, depending on your case and PSU selection. The problem with using SBCs or mini PCs that way is that you need an enclosure to hold, power, and cool down your disks, and even that is assuming that you can actually connect them via a SATA/SAS connection which may not be easily available from within your case.
Looks like the Radxa CM5 is still significantly faster than Pi CM5, while only being slightly more expensive (113USD vs 95USD for the 8GB/64GB model from what I could find). Anyone here has any experience with it?
Over on reddit I once floated a similar idea but everyone exclaimed that USB enclosures sucks and you should not use them at all. Now technically you could - with some PCIe expansion cards - connect SAS/SATA HDDs to the ports on your mini/SFF PC, but then you need an enclosure for holding, powering and cooling the disks. Holding and cooling is simple enough and there's enclosures on AliExpress that cost like 10 bucks that do it for you, but you'd still need a PSU outside of the PC to power the disks. At that point the USB enclosure starts looking even more enticing.
Which one are you using right now? There's some brands out there that are considered really bad by the community.
Sounds fun! Were you already familiar with networking/Ethernet when you started? If not, which resources - if any - did you use to get a broad overview of everything involved? My knowledge of networking ends at a very basic understanding of the OSI model, and I am very interested in taking a deep dive into the networking world.
I'll tell you how I learned, I got thrown head-first into a network switch design. I knew almost nothing about networking.
The most useful resource while I was learning was RFC1812 "Requirements for IPv4 Routers" [1]
Its an ancient document written the same year I was born detailing how future routers should be built on this relatively new thing called the internet. The language is highly approachable and detailed, often explaining WHY things are done. It is an awesome read.
To be honest you don't need to finish it. I only read the first few chapters, but I googled EVERYTHING I did not understand. The first few paragraphs took several hours. Talk to LLM's if you need a concept explained. Take notes. In a few days you'll have a very solid grasp.
Wireshark, plus a book about using Wireshark. I have "Wireshark Network Analysis", which looks to be shockingly expensive right now - to be fair, it's worth whatever price, but maybe not while you're speculativey getting your toes wet - and there are others out there. I am nowhere near an expert (I've only worked through about 1/3 of that book - just enough to solve the problem I had at the time!), but that's what's taught me what I know, and I know can take me further.
I wasn't at all, to be honest. I joined a multidisciplinary team and they were short an Ethernet SME. I said I'd be happy to just in feet first and learn, as I was desperate to get into anything and everything FPGAs at the time, having become bored by the CPU world I resided before. Mostly I learnt everything through building stuff using our User Guides. Everything else was just reading; the Ethernet spec, random Cisco stuff online, Wikipedia, etc. I just searched for any word or acronym I didn't understand, and read up on it (meaning of 64/66b encoding, PCS vs PHY vs MAC, PTP, OTN, FlexE, FEC, ANLT, and so on). Once you get passed the TLAs, it's actually pretty simple (except for PTP - that's the bane or my working life at the moment).
No way that any technologically competent person can claim that the iPhone 16 is a massive and amazing improvement over the iPhone 15. There is "change", sure - the chip is now every so slightly faster, it can do "AI things", it can take slightly better photos, etc.
But any comparison of these changes with the previous model for an average use case - which is what most people buy iPhones for, not benchmarking - would hardly yield any visible differences. Scrolling through reddit or HN or Instagram is about the same on both devices, and gaming gives you a few more frames if you care about that sort of thing, and I say that as someone with those exact models. Apple could have easily skipped releasing a new model this year, packaged exactly the same hardware and released the iPhone 16 the next year and fundamentally nothing would've changed. But the shareholders won't like that, will they?
>No way that any technologically competent person can claim that the iPhone 16 is a massive and amazing improvement over the iPhone 15.
Kicking off with a logical fallacy, strong start.
>There is "change", sure - the chip is now every so slightly faster, it can do "AI things", it can take slightly better photos, etc.
Just say you're technologically uninformed.
>But any comparison of these changes with the previous model for an average use case
Kathy using Instagram while she waits in line at the supermarket is not a useful point of comparison when we're comparing iterative improvements, keep up.
>Apple could have easily skipped releasing a new model this year, packaged exactly the same hardware and released the iPhone 16 the next year and fundamentally nothing would've changed.
