I could do that, but I want my warranty. 
And I won’t be living in this studio apartment for long anymore, will move all my equipment to my mom’s apartment and I’ll move to New Hampshire.
Fair enough re: warranty.
I just can’t imagine sleeping with the threat of that annoying UPS beeping sound
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Yeah, UPS everything. A few crashes some years ago taught me that lesson. Total data corruption while I let something run, I don’t remember what it was now. But totally boofed whatever OS I was running. I think it was windows and woke to a BSOD after a power outage. Yeah, UPS everything.
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After a few installs on a thumb drive, different distros, etc. I just don’t trust it. I decided to go the m.2 route. I couldn’t find a free sata port on the mobo. But what I did find is a populated sata port for the cd drive, that I opted against when I bought the server. I decided to get a laptop cd sata converter and a 2.5 drive to dual m.2 sata. Two m.2s at 120GB. I think this will work out.
I have to disagree. UPSes are a common cause of power loss. In an area with generally reliable power, home users are likely to have better uptime without a UPS.
Practically all UPSes do naive switch-to-battery-and-pray self-tests periodically (Eaton units with ABM are the only exceptions I’ve found after many years of experience with many different brands, large and small). If the battery is in a bad enough state, this will drop the load. There are also plenty of situations where a sagging line voltage will cause the UPS to kick in and again drop the load if the battery is weak or the UPS is nearing overload, even while directly powered systems ride right through.
With dual-power supplies on two different UPSes, you’ve got much better odds of survival, but don’t underestimate the ability of UPS manufacturers to do something stupid, like APC’s perfectly synchronized self-tests EXACTLY two-weeks-to-the-second after utility power last came on. The sudden drop and surge in electrical demand can trigger other UPSes to switch off line power briefly, and even trip breakers in extreme cases.
At a minimum, if you’ve got a single UPS powering anything important, replace the battery after no more than 3 years while it’s still working well, BEFORE you see any issues. And use only reliable name brand batteries.
Then don’t buy an el-cheapo UPS?
Well, that’s one mystery explained for me by accident, that I don’t need to google after 
Now I know how to schedule test on my home APC, so it doesn’t start beeping at some stupid hour when I’m sleeping, like in the middle of the day 
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APC is overpriced sh*t if you ask me. I had at my last workplace around 50 APC desktop units, 50% loaded at most, almost 20 of them failed between 3 weeks and 9 months after warranty ended. Eaton is a nice brand, if the 9130 was quieter, I would have kept it home for my LackRack Lab, but it felt like a vacuum cleaner staying near it (I powered it off and brought it back the next day, because I couldn’t sleep because of it).
I got generic UPSes, one protecting my DVR, router and RPi Wireguard VPN to it at a remote location, another one at home powering my pfSense box (AsRock J3455M), ISP’s ONT, my Zyxel router in AP mode, a Pi 4 8gb (main desktop) and another J3455M mini-server (used to be my old desktop). Just bought another one of these to protect my used server soon-to-be NAS and VM Host and another PC. I had so many brownouts lately, I can’t believe it.
I had an old APC BackUPS 300, lasted me 20 years (only ~10 years of usage). I had a newer model (Back-UPS CS 500) that lasted 5 years of usage, with battery changed, before it blew in my face (and it had a terrible coil whine). I don’t trust newer APC UPSes. Generic ones, if they aren’t complete sh*t inside, should be just fine. Whenever I had a brownout, the UPS would kick-in and supply my computers with enough juice for a few seconds until the power got stable again. Additionally, I mentioned above the blackout at 3 am, where this generic puppy saved my computers from imminent poweroff.
As for UPSes triggering a brownout, if your other UPSes don’t switch to battery fast enough, then you got a bad brand. And if your UPS is tripping the breaker, you are sucking too much juice from the wall. My old APC BackUPS 300 kept my pfSense box, ONT and Zyxel router for 1 year up (around 400-something days of uptime BSD Challenge ). Nowadays this APC (and also the one that blew in my face) wouldn’t switch to battery fast enough (and I replaced their batteries) and would restart my systems, so I removed them.
tl;dr: you can buy cheap unmanaged UPSes, don’t get the cheapest of the bunch, get more power than you actually need, so you don’t overload them, don’t keep all your devices on just 1 UPS and one power line, split the load and always change batteries 2 or 3 years apart. You wouldn’t keep using your oil in your car, so why would you keep using an old battery in your UPS?
aka don’t buy trip-lite. They’re absolute trash. I have around 25 of them at work I’m trying to phase out right now. They cause more harm than benefit. Garbage.
There’s no way that this is accurate. MOST individuals experience at least one 30 second power outage event every 3 to 4 months. I’ve got 213 days uptime on an unraid server (with 180 or so days prior to that - only needed to shutdown to physically move its location). I’ve definitely experienced at least 4x 30 second power outages during those times, all easily mitigated with an UPS with no issue. In all the places I’ve lived (all reasonably populous non-rural environments), I’ve never experienced a situation where the power just NEVER goes out.
You know what is a more common source of power loss? Power loss. 100% guaranteed system down when your power goes out.
This is like saying cars are unreliable if you don’t put gas in them. This isn’t a reasonable criticism of UPS, but rather a criticism of unreasonable behavior. Change the batteries every 2.5 years on a schedule (or sooner if your power is more prone to frequent drops). And obviously set-up your UPS to power-down your system if you’re experiencing a power event that exceeds 50% capacity so you never drain the battery down to 0%.
I promise that you won’t get 2.5 year uptime WITHOUT an UPS in any house in America.
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If you’ve got a source for that, I’d love to see it.
Cars have accurate gas gauges. It’s not possible to have an accurate battery gauge. It’s a bad analogy, too. More like you get suddenly ejected from a working car if you haven’t cleaned the seat in a while…
Quite a few cities go that long between power events. Of course some areas are unlucky and bring the average down.
Here’s the list: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/eia861/
I was referring to quite a few UPSes across a data center, though once or twice I’ve seen it in private homes with several large pieces of equipment on UPSes blowing the main 100A breaker. Sudden synchronized drops then spikes in electrical demand are no good.
This only applies to outages greater than 5 minutes. Minor power outages are significantly more frequent. Even so this data demonstrates that the average American experiences more than 1 power outage a year.
Steering this back to the point at hand:
1.) OP I hope you did decide to separate your router instance from your storage server and run two boxes instead of one box!
2.) I still hope you have something to prevent your server from suddenly turning off, be it an UPS or faith in your public utility provider.
I have 2 main machine that I ran my network off of. I use vitalization to due that. I used to use old Dell servers. However now I run machine that I built. The short version is that it works well for me. I have been doing this for while. I have use Window Server for file sharing and use DFS. So one the machine can be out and everthing will still work. I have also virtualized my router running PFsense. I also run Unifi so that is image as well. I even run TV as a image. The short version is that virtualization my network I have no issue. I am running Vmware vsphere.
Look at your setup you could use exsi free. Support Max of 32 GB ram. Other couple notes that I would if you are doing that. Use good network card(R420 should be fine). I also recommend use UPS. Also of if that server has enabled use Idrac. In case you are away and need make change.
UPS, I will never trust Utility Companies. Momma didn’t raise no fool, just an idiot 
I have decided to separate my pfsense from my storage device. Just makes more sense/is less of a headache.
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So I’ve install xcp-ng and TrueNAS inside of it. After installing I found that I can install VMs inside of TrueNAS. Why didn’t I know that? I don’t know. So why not just install TrueNAS and run everything from there. Seems to me to be a whole lot simpler that way. With the added benefits of utilizing zfs raidz2, or even raidz for more storage. I guess you don’t really know until you start messing with these things more seriously.
I could have sworn I have posted this…
Nope, never mind, it was another topic:
Sorry, I assumed you knew that TrueNAS can run VMs (I did briefly mentioned docker, FreeBSD packages and Jails in my first comment (no. 14 in this thread).
No slight against y’all. I just feel like an idiot having not known that. And I didn’t know about jails or what they are. But about twenty minutes with TrueNAS, and I totally get it.
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Learning something new makes you the opposite of an idiot.
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