It’s not so much “constantly leaving it plugged in” as “constantly leaving it at a high state of charge” (near 100%) which naturally follows from the first.
In recent versions of iOS and macOS, Apple have added features to keep the battery at 80% charge as much as possible for this very reason - it massively extends battery life to not be at 100% all the time.
Wiktionary, the free dictionary
Noun PC (countable and uncountable, plural PCs)
Initialism of personal computer.
A personal computer, especially one similar to an IBM PC that runs Microsoft Windows (or, originally, DOS), usually as opposed to (say) an Apple Mac.
1987, InfoWorld, volume 9, numbers 27-39, page 28: “For some of the imaging we do,” says Richard Miner, research manager at the University of Lowell’s Center for Productivity Enhancement, “we are using both the Amiga and the PC [with the bridge card]. […]
2006, Sonia Weiss, Streetwise Selling On Ebay, →ISBN, page 89: In general, the prices for PC and Mac laptops can be competitive, […]
2010, Ann Raimes, Maria Jerskey, Keys for Writers, →ISBN, page 297: Versions of Word for PC and Mac It is not unusual to find both Mac and PC computers in college computer laboratories, so you may need to become familiar with both Word for PCs and Word for Mac.
There isn’t a standard that is broadly-adopted, but NUT (https://networkupstools.org/) has reverse-engineered drivers for nearly every UPS out there, usually each brand has their standard so as long as the brand is supported it will work. (NUT is also what TrueNAS, Synology, QNAP, etc use internally for their UPS support)
I’ve had good luck with using NUT with APC UPSes (both consumer models and buying used enterprise rack-mount models).
One cool thing you can do with NUT is share the UPS state over the network, so that multiple machines can respond to the power state instead of just the machine that is plugged in via USB directly.
When I was following Synology communities closer, the common wisdom was that the expansion units weren’t great in either performance, stability or cost, and you were better off buying a new, bigger unit and then selling your old one used to recoup the cost difference.
I’m also in the same position, I have a DS918+ that is full. It’s also 6 years old and probably on the tail end of getting software updates so I’m weighing my choices…
It’s 6 years old now so I can’t really complain but even new ones don’t come with 2.5Gbe by standard, it seems that should be cheap enough to throw in there by now. At least a lot of the new ones can be upgraded internally to 10 Gbe.
It’s from a japanese Gacha machine! https://bitbang.social/@kalleboo/112755170852099746
Precisely, the rear ethernet is 1 Gbit, the USB adapter is 2.5 Gbit!
I just got 10 Gbit internet last week so I had a chance to tidy everything up. The ThinkCentre is the 10 Gbit router, the Synology actually hosts everything.
Also finally labeled all the mystery cables. Also replaced the proprietary 20V/12V bricks for the ThinkCentre and 10G Fiber ONU with USB-C adapter cables to keep things tidier.
Here are some results if anyone comes across this thread in the future.
The baseline result I need to achieve is a speedtest result of 7.5 Gbit that the ISP’s rental router gives me.
I ended up picking up:
Initially I installed pfSense. I ran iperf3 to just get an initial sanity check that the PCIe card/wiring was working right but was getting results between 3-7 Gbit with the CPU pegging at 50%. Some quick googling returned results like “you can’t run iperf on pfSense!” and “pfSense isn’t a router, why do people keep using it as a router, it’s a firewall!”, so I decided to switch to OpenWRT since the Linux side of things always seems to make more sense.
On OpenWRT, iperf easily hit 9 Gbit with like the CPU at 95% idle.
It took like 2 hours to configure the weird IPIP6 tunnel my ISP uses for IPv4, but once it was set up, the machine has no trouble routing the same 7.5 Gbit speedtest the ISP router managed, with the CPU usage at 78% idle (the remainder in “sirq”)
Power consumption:
Yeah my friend left his MacBook Pro at airport security and when he was reunited 3 weeks later it still had like 50% charge with him tracking it using Find My the whole time
I can only look at Mikrotik gear in jealousy since they don’t have a reseller here, so all that’s available are overpriced, un-warrantied gray imports…
Very interesting, thanks for the links
The low power consumption is one of the reasons I was attracted to the ThinkCenter M720q devices. It definitely wouldn’t be worth it if I had to build some tower PC or run a Xeon server!
The ISP router I’m getting is 10 Gbit (on WAN and one LAN port, the rest are 1 Gbit), but the configuration seems limited and it’s a $5/mo rental tacked onto the bill.
I think I can live without IDS/IPS, in all the time I used it on UniFi, it never gave me any actionable info, so hopefully that helps me with performance.
That’s interesting about the 10Gbit ethernet cards. Is that with something like a Mellanox or some other card? My NAS is going to be stuck on 2.5 Gbit since it’s just a Synology.
Thanks for the Intel x520 recommendation, those are looking like a much better deal right now than the Mellanox cards I was looking at.
Glad to hear it about the BSD networking!
I’m still trying to avoid the Xeons for power consumption reasons, hehe, although it would be a lot more fun for sure!
Yeah I’m not ordering anything until I have the connection up and running, which is why I opted to rent the ISP router to begin with, but looking at results online that others on the same ISP have posted, I can probably expect up to around 7 Gbit real-world so I’ve been thinking that I will at least want something better than the standard 1 Gbit or even 2.5 Gbit stuff out there, hence why I’m trying to research what the hardware requirements actually are!
These ThinkCenter M720q machines I’m looking at all seem to have a single PCIe 3.0 8x card slot, regardless of the CPU, and that seems to be all that the Mellanox ConnectX cards need according to their spec sheets, so hopefully that is good.
We also need to consider the practical aspects. Who mucks after the horses? Who feeds them? Do we need a stall? Does it need to be air conditioned in the summer/winter?
That marketing copy is just amazing.
First of all, acknowledging that the blimp is “incredibly wacky”
Then trying to sell the fact that it doesn’t float, mount or have any powered features as “Just you and good clean fun!”