Onyx Is Running!
June 1, 2025
Last weekend, I went out and made a purchase to finally get Onyx up and running the way I’ve wanted for the past few months. My 19 year old HP Compac DC5750 is now my onsite backup NAS for both Terra Venture and KO-35; my web server and photography storage NAS.
I fitted Onyx with new 4 and 10-terabyte WD Red Plus SATA HDD’s. I also held on to one of my 500-gigabyte WD Blue SATA HDD’s for my personal data and data shared between local devices (office/studio system, laptop, and phone).
The system is nothing more than Ubuntu Server 24.04 and Samba. I have a shell script that I run before shutting down KO-35 and nightly on Terra Venture that backs up to Onyx via rsync. I’d like to figure out a better way to backup KO-35 as I don’t leave it running continuously, only turning it on when I plan to do work with the files stored on it, and feel like one day I’ll forget to run the script before shutting down and miss out on an important backup right before something bad happens. So I will be doing some research into how to make this better. If you have any ideas, feel free to let me know.
This HP Compaq DC5750 gets the job done, but being such an old machine, I feel like it is running a lot of electricity. One of my next networking projects is to eventually find a more power efficient system that can hold at least two 3.5″ HDD’s along with a 2.5″ SSD or NVMe drive that I can switch Onyx over to, and maybe even save some space in the process. This is a pretty big tower. Also, putting a 2.5-gig network card in it would be nice.
Now, to get around to imposing on my friend in California and setting up an off-site backup at their place.