One major frustration that I ran into during the RV trip was digital storage. During the course of the trip, I shot enough photos and videos to fill up all the storage I had with me, including my 4tb MacBook Pro, my 2tb iPad, my 512gb iPhone, and the one external drive I had with me, a 2tb SSD. Eventually at Anchorage I was able to get another 4tb flash drive, but filled up it as well basically instantly with a Time Machine backup, finding myself a little more safe from drive failure but not much closer to breathing room.
To be fair, part of the problem in that instance was slow internet leading to a massive cloud upload backlog. But while I waited for that, I had little to no redundancy of my files. Once I got the Starlink dish, remote backup became an option again, but being short on storage along the way was deeply nerve wracking for me.
I began looking into options I could pursue to maximize the available storage I carried in the RV., and well, most of the options weren’t totally ideal. A NAS was going to be bulky and potentially power hungry at least some of the time, and quite costly as well. Most NASes were designed for 3.5” hard drives, so while I would prefer to have at least one copy of my storage volume on a solid state drive for protection from vibration (it is mounted in an off road vehicle after all) I would want to mostly use solid state storage in it, and the costs started to add up, with most NAS boxes costing $400 or more before you even add the drives. A basic 8+8 NAS, the best possible value with flash storage, would cost me around $1200. That would be for a Synology 2.5” six drive unit, the DS620 Slim ($450), with a starter set of 2x8tb Samsung drives ($700). Admittedly this wasn’t a totally awful option, but $450 for an enclosure that was still fairly bulky was hard to swallow. I would’ve paid that easily if it was NVME and smaller than a study bible, but not for something that is still basically a shoebox.
I eventually remembered that Apple once made a dual-drive Mac Mini. Could I stuff two very large drives inside of that? Naively, I figured that laptop hard drives could probably stuff a vast amount of storage in there – maybe dual 12 or 16 TB drives? I began to search. But it turns out that nobody ever made a laptop hard drive bigger than 5tb. In fact, it looks like most drive makers never went beyond 4tb.
SSD makers, though, actually had. And it turns out you can get a Samsung 8tb SSD in 2.5” SATA for about $350. I found a 2014 Mac Mini on Facebook for $190 including a monitor, and upon checking the specs I confirmed that it was one with the dual drive capability. So I went ahead and picked it up, and ordered the two drives, plus 16gb of ram (the max this model supported, apparently) and the needed cable and mounting screws to add the second drive. I put the process off for a few days, frankly fearing the process of dismantling the Mini, but it turned out to be not nearly as bad as I expected. Certainly better than most laptops. It was around a dozen screws altogether, around an hour total, including slowly and carefully reviewing the instructions along the way. But I could have gotten it intuitively. The bizarre thing is just how tight the case is. The two drives stack toward the front of the case, in front of the logic board and above the wifi antenna. The cooling fan and duct go on top of everything else relative to assembly position, but ultimately the bottom of the machine. Because the machine is kind of bucket shaped, really opening only partially on two sides, the procedure requires removing every component down to the power supply. This is required only in order to mount the drive to otherwise inaccessible screw holes on the bracket. But in the end it really wasn’t a difficult task at all, and now I have this weird Frankenstein MacSter. Yeah that’s awful, but I like it. You literally can’t buy this much storage in a compact Mac today. Even the Mac Studio today has a max internal storage of 8tb.
Mild update:
I’ve got the Mini fully up and running, with a copy of Mac OS Mojave, the last MacOS to include native screen sharing and 32 bit legacy software. I didn’t really see any strong tradeoffs that would justify a newer version of MacOS and giving up the secondary utility of being a legacy capable machine. Right now the only legacy concern I could think of would be to run my old Scansnap unit, which could be nice because a scanner isn’t an objectively bad thing to have in a mobile office – though unnecessary now that the iPhone scans decently. So I may never use that function anyway.
I haven’t done much with the machine besides start copying files to it. Eventually, I’ll set up a ray c script to keep all critical folders in sync from the Synology, and I still haven’t decided how to do that. Rsync over a vpn is an option, but there may be a better solution. My Dropbox account has 4.5TB available that I haven’t tapped, which could be a turnkey solution, albeit a half cloudy “cheat.” I could just use a mix of iCloud and Dropbox to get this thing up and running with full triple redundancy before my next bit of major travel, but it’s not urgent.
I will need to figure out a power solution. I don’t think that the RV inverter is reliable enough. In testing, even with the big battery bank I have it’s possible for that thing to drain down in just a day if I for example accidentally run the electric water heater off it. That could be fixed but beyond what I want to do with that trailer right now. It also doesn’t provide gapless switching to shore power, because it can’t parallel. So, I would need to get a separate uninterruptible power supply for the Mac Mini.
I’m presently load testing it for power, with multiple USB and network file copies going on. It’s only drawing 48W total, far less than its 80W peak rating. I’ve got the CPU past 100% too, but I could probably tax it further with a video render to find the true peak. Okay, upon extended testing, it looks like with Power Nap and a lot of background tasks, it’s still drawing around 30 watts consistently with a peak just a little over 50. That’s even with multiple USB devices plugged in.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.