I wanted to start the year off right and knock two big to-dos off my list. 1. Get a new Mac Studio for my home office. I’ve been working day-to-day on a criminally under-provisioned 2019 MacBook Pro, with only 8GB of RAM (:scream: I know). It’s been workable, but not ideal in any sense. And 2, upgrade my Plex server storage. Like most people, I started with an older spare computer I had laying around, and a USB external hard drive attached to store some media. This quickly grew into a mess of 3 external drives connected to a Mac mini. The more I added to it, the more I got nervous about my points of failure. It would really suck to lose all that data. So I decided to repurpose an old Dell Poweredge R520 I got for free from a friend of mine that works in IT. It has 8 3.5 SATA hot-swap bays.

I ordered both the Mac Studio, and the new hard drives the same week, but a couple days apart. Apple said the new mac would be here on Janurary 19th, and Amazon reported Janurary 11th for the drives. I awake the morning of the 11th, and start to make some coffee. I realize what day it is and get excited about my drives coming. As my coffee finishes, I get a notification. Ding! My new mac will now be arriving today!

Jim fist pump

I waited, and waited, and around 2pm I see the UPS guy cheerfully drop 2 big boxes on my porch, I run down the stairs like a 9 year old on Christmas. I bring everything up to the office for “The Unboxing”. I start with the Mac mini, carefully slicing each tapped edge of the outer packaging box with an X-ACTO knife. Inside I find the standard, beautiful and intuitive Apple packaging. It basically unboxes itself as I slowly reveal powerful looking silver box with an Apple logo atop. Throw it on the desk, plug it in to my new 3 monitor setup and BOOM! I’m crusing around on the fastest, most RAM-filled computer I’ve ever used. 2023 is going to be a good year.

Then I turn my attention to the 4 10TB WD Red hard drives. Again carefully slicing each sealed box, getting to the drives sealed in their moisture lock bags. I throw some nitrile gloves on and begin removing the stock 2TB drives in each caddy and replacing it with the shiny new 10TB drives. After blowing and vacuuming a good amount of dust out, I throw all the drive caddies back in and boot into unraid. I breeze through the drive setup, and it starts the pairty build. ETA 16 hours… Ugh.

The next morning it’s down to just a couple hours, and by 11am it’s complete!

Checkout my side post: Migrating my Plex library with ssh, screen, and rsync