Agreed. The products I have used above, DrivePool, SnapRaid and UnRaid are all software solutions. This was important to me because I was reusing hardware and had a real eclectic mix of drives from 14TB NAS drives to 256GB laptop drives that I wanted to get more life out of.

The only hardware limitation is the parity based apps SnapRaid and UnRaid need your largest drive to be the parity one. Makes sense but in a situation like mine where I had a 14TB drive and the next closes was 8TB, that parity drive wasn’t well utilised. Not a big issue but.

As others have said, you certainly can.

If your current system is a Windows PC then a super easy way to go about it is to purchase a product called Stablebit DrivePool which will allow you to combine multiple hard disks into one drive, and then do duplication of data you find important. Share that virtual drive as a Share that your other systems can see. DriePool is a super reliable product. Only downside other than the one time cost is that its redundancy is based on file duplication, which has the benefit that you can pull your drives out and use them elsewhere as any one file is always contained on a single drive, but unlike parity based solutions it’s super space inefficient to retain duplicate copies. It’s a tradeoff between simplicity and time to recover in a failure versus maximising disk use and reducing costs. Depending what your NAS is for, maybe you don’t need that redundancy but. You can also team it up with another product called SnapRaid (which is free) which can make your redundancy parity based.

I ran DrivePool for years on Windows and it’s a great product. Windows itself isn’t overly optimised for this use case, but as a predominately Mac household having access to Windows on a headless system was handy if I had to run the odd Windows only apps, so using Windows had its perks.

While Windows and a PC will cost more to operate, you’ll potentially be out well ahead if you don’t have to buy additional hardware. It’s likely worth running what you have into the ground rather than buying new hardware. There’s guides on some things you can do to optimise Windows too.

I’ve since moved to using UnRaid which is a paid product (one time purchase) designed specifically for NAS on your own PC. Great solution but I’d say that the barrier of entry is much higher than a Windows box. Still very versatile product. Moved to that as over time I’ve used a bit more Linux in my life, and I also had reduced need for Windows as the NAS OS.

Haven’t tried TrueNas but that’d be an alternative to UnRaid.

I am curious, how many fans were still there at 1:30? At one point the tv presenting showed people being asked to leave and there wasn’t a stack of people left several hours after p1 was cancelled. Made me wonder whether if they were incapable of keeping all stadiums staffed, could they have funnelled the remaining people, if not too many, to the main grandstand (or say two) and closed all the others.

I do feel for the people but, especially those that may have only had tickets to day 1. Even those with 3 days missed out, wasted a day off work, etc, as a result.

It happens though…Spa 2021 being another similar situation where the crowd wasn’t necessarily ejected, but they didn’t see what they’d come for either.

I quite like the sprint, so my rather boring opinion is to move the qualifying to Saturday afternoon, then slide the sprint race and it’s qualifying forward a slot. I would then have Parc Ferme kick in at qualifying at the some time as a normal weekend.

This would mean teams can and will play around with setup over the sprint quali and race, but I’m ok with that given the smaller point allocation. Also neither the qualifying or the sprint itself are necessarily ideal places to be playing around with setup too much, especially since no one pits in the sprint, so doing too much setup change might be a risk for a team. It does mean those that got it terribly wrong after FP1 can gamble on some setup changes however. Ultimately coming out of the sprint you’d still need a car fit to go through the GPs qualifying and race, so there’s still that to balance things a bit.

The reverse grid suggestion is interesting, but I’m not sure how it’ll work in practice and perhaps it needs to be a longer race then to allow more time to come through the field. If teams feel the sprint is too high risk already, I can’t see the top teams wanting to now come through a field every sprint session. If they’re going to do this they need to pick tracks with high overtaking rates.

The 3rd and 4th was due to good team strategy to get a lap down early in Q3. They did well enough still on their own merit to make it to Q3, but I suspect they’d have been much lower if the cars weren’t compromised by the weather.

Bigger question for me was why Perez came out so late for Q3 when RB clearly wanted Max out as early as possible.

Getting pole should be a guaranteed victory…unless you’re Charles Leclerc