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Raspberry Pi, Home Assistant Server, and Plex Media Server
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XDA ☛ 6 reasons I run DietPi on my original Raspberry Pi Zero W
My Raspberry Pi Zero W may be old, but it’s far from obsolete. With the right Linux distro, it still has real value in low-power projects and dedicated tasks. I chose DietPi because it maximizes the potential of limited hardware without requiring me to go through unnecessary hoops. It’s small, efficient, and purpose-built for exactly the kind of tinkering I want to do.
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HowTo Geek ☛ 7 Projects That Turn Your Raspberry Pi Into the Perfect Travel Companion
Are you prepping to head out on vacation with the family? If so, did you know that your Raspberry Pi is actually the perfect travel companion? The mini computer can actually do quite a few things that might surprise you.
From acting as a full-blown media server to a blog that you can write offline and have automatically sync up when connected to the internet, your Raspberry Pi is the perfect travel companion for your upcoming vacation and trips.
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HowTo Geek ☛ 7 Reasons Why a Mini PC Makes the Perfect Home Assistant Server
Smart home ecosystems such as Alexa and Apple Home are great for simple smart home control and basic smart home automations. But if you want more powerful control and the ability to integrate with almost any smart home device you can think of, Home Assistant is one of your best options.
The free and open-source smart home software has a reasonably steep learning curve, but it's becoming more and more accessible. One of the biggest sticking points is that you'll need a device to run the software on. There are plenty of options, but there are several big reasons why a mini PC makes an ideal Home Assistant server.
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HowTo Geek ☛ 7 Things Nobody Tells You About Hosting a Plex Media Server
Are you thinking about starting a Plex server soon? While the initial setup of Plex is easy, there are definitely some nuances I wish I knew about at the beginning. That’s why I made this list: to keep you from making the same mistakes I did.
These issues aren’t talked about often, yet they’re very important in the day-to-day running of a Plex server. So here are seven things that I wish I knew when I got started running my own media server.
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HowTo Geek ☛ Why I Stopped Using RAID on My Plex Media Server
RAID is typically the go-to method for redundancy in servers, and it definitely has stood the test of time. What if I told you I intentionally stopped using RAID on my Plex server? Here’s why.
RAID Requires All Drives to Be the Same Size
My first home-built NAS ran on TrueNAS, which utilizes a traditional RAID structure for its drives. While TrueNAS handles all the RAID software-side (which I’ll get to why that can be important in a moment), I still was almost immediately turned off from using RAID.
One of the biggest drawbacks to RAID, in my opinion, is that it requires all drives to be the same size. I had a wide range of storage drive sizes that I wanted to use for my NAS, including 3TB, 4TB, 6TB, and 8TB drives.