Snatch and smash. It's the viral trend that's breaking all the rules and maybe
your phone. This clip with over 6 million views on Tik Tok shows an
elderly man sneaking up on an unsuspecting Zoomer snatching her phone
and smashing it right in front of her. Hey Billy, did you see this on the TV
news? It's fake news, Dad. Look, it's the same guy in a different
hat. I reverse AI searched him and his LinkedIn employer just says he has
contracts at Google and Apple. It's just a stunt to promote iCloud and Google 1.
But you have the iDrive, right? No, Dad. My generation can't afford
BMWs. Unsettling, if true. [music]
Now, it's time for today's Tech Tip Minute, where we're going to be showing you an affordable way to safeguard your
data. Watch this. I press this button and instantly, my photos are syncing
over the internet. But instead of to an expensive cloud storage provider, I'm
backing up to the NAS board right behind me. Wow, look at it go. Of course,
networkattached storage or NAS devices
are nothing new. What's special here is the value. The friendly elect CM3588
NAS kit costs about what you'd spend for 2 TB of cloud storage per year, and its
ARMbased processor from Rock Chip crushes the CPU in this $700 bigname
NAS. As a bonus, it's so efficient, it can be powered by just a 2 amp 12volt
input. There is one more thing you'll need to know before you can stop paying
that monthly subscription, and we're going to tell you all about it after the
break.
Despite being able to purchase the CM3588 standalone, it's really intended
to slot into their bundle $35 .naz NAS
kit that comes equipped with 2 and 1/2 gig Ethernet, three HDMI ports, one in,
two out, USB 3, USBC, a micro SD slot,
and the star of the show, four full-sized M.2 PCIe Gen 3 slots. How is
this only $35? I mean, I guess if you
take away the expensive bits like the SOC and the RAM, a PCB, and some
connectors. It even has GPIO. Still doesn't cost very much. All we got to do
is install a cute little heat sink, click it into place, and we're done. But
this ease of use is only part of the story. The other part is modularity. For
now, Friendly only has this one board.
But in the future, who knows? A SATA version for hard drives or maybe one
with a PCI Express slot. That would be sick. And what's cool is in the future,
if your daughter board still meets your needs, but you want more performance,
you could potentially upgrade the brain of your tiny Naz without having to scrap
the whole thing. I mean, no promises. The first iteration kind of has to
succeed for there to be a follow-up, but as it stands right now, I kind of love
it. This version of the compute board comes with 4 gigs of DDR4X memory and no
onboard storage. So, the expectation is you either use the SD slot on the NAS
kit or you upgrade to the 8 or 16 gig
RAM versions, which include 64 gigs of eMMC storage. We ended up with the
ladder, which brought our price to $160.
It's not cheap, but it's a really solid value when you consider that that's a
onetime cost. Kind of like our LT screwdriver. Yeah, one driver, many
different bits. Let's get these drives installed. But while we're doing that,
let's talk about the options that we have. Each of these slots is a PCIe Gen
3x1 connection. So that does limit our bandwidth a little bit, but it also
opens up some very interesting options. For example, with inexpensive adapters,
we could turn each of these into as many as five SATA ports, giving us support
for 20 conventional hard drives. We were
more interested though in a tiny power efficient solidstate NAS. Now, with only
one lane per port, we're not going to be setting any speed records here. But
realistically, our 2 and 1/2 gig network interface is going to limit us long
before those PCIe lanes will, which realistically gave us a lot of
flexibility when it came to choosing our SSDs. We obviously don't want anything
unreliable, so we're not going to go with the cheapest thing, but we don't
need to spend a fortune either. So, we picked these 4 TB MP34 drives from
Tegroup for $165 each. They're only Gen
3, but they have a 5-year warranty, and they even come with a DRAM cache, though
that shouldn't really have an impact on the relatively sequential video editing
work that we would do off of this thing at a trade show or something. And for
that matter, most NAS duties are pretty similar, whether you're using it for PC
backup, photo and movie backup, or even running a video streaming server with
Plex or Jellyfin. And besides, because you're configuring your own, you can
choose lower capacity drives or you can populate just two slots, run them in a
mirror for redundancy. Then six months later, when you get a nice paycheck, you
can add one or two more. So, some of you are probably wondering then, why do you
need a NAS instead of just using external hard drives anyway? Well, for
starters, these things suck. They're a single point of failure, and they're
super easy to lose. By comparison, a NAS
can be shared with anyone else on your network, which leads to point two.
Having all of your data on your personal machine is something that I have advocated against for years. Your daily
driver is the most likely to be infected by malware or to suffer a malfunction,
putting any data that's on it at risk. With that said, a single copy on a NAS
isn't best practice either, and you should always follow the 321 rule. three
copies of your data on two types of media with one of them being offsite.
Now, we usually turn to trunaz for these types of projects, but with this board
being ARMbased, we were forced to look for another option and eventually we
settled on OMV or Open Media Vault.
Conveniently, Friendly website includes a link to a Google Drive that has all
the install files and instructions for the different methods of installation.
We're going to be going from an SD card to our eMMC storage. The process took
about 25 minutes and at the end gave us an IP that we could use to access the
guey for open media vault. We chose RAID
5 for a balance of protection and capacity and after compiling and syncing
we were left with dang almost 11.2 TB of
capacity. Now we want to connect it to our Windows-based computers. So we
enable SMB the protocol that Windows uses for network file sharing and then
create a shared drive. Let's see how we did. Different media file copying from
our desktop to our tiny nez. Wow.
Completely saturating our two and a half gig interface. That's awesome.
I wonder how much CPU usage is happening. Yeah, you can actually check
that. We could check that. Yeah, pretty substantial amount.
Not very powerful. And transfer back. Wow. There you go.
It's almost like that's a lot of interface for a 2 and 1/2 gig
connection. Did I mention it's completely flipping silent?
Barely even hot to the touch.
What am I even listening for? There's no fan on it. Just whatever. It doesn't matter.
Do you know where there are fans though? Flow plane.
Oh, go subscribe to Flow Plane. This is all fine and good, but it
doesn't answer the question of how do we protect ourselves against the very real
threat of snatch and smash? Well, under
the plug-in section in OMV, you can grab Photo Prism, an AI powered photo library
that we can use a separate application to sync to. In our case, we used Photo
Sync. So, for just over $5, we're able
to sync our photos with almost any storage solution you can think of,
including Photo Prism. And what's really cool is the sync can work both ways. So,
if your phone ever dies and you need to replace it, you just resign into
Photosync and you can sync back from your NAS to whatever new phone you get.
No monthly subscription, just a one-time payment of this many dollars for the
app. Compared to more common setups, x86
processors on Trunaz or Unread, for example, we did have times when we
needed a little extra tinkering and knowhow to get things working. But after
Jake spent a couple of hours getting Plex up and running in a Docker container, this little guy handled
streaming just great to two concurrent
clients. At least at 1080p it did. Once we bumped it up to 4K, that was a
different story. But hey, if you're not super satisfied with the playback off of
this device, that's okay. You can run the Plex server on a more powerful
machine in your house, say your gaming desktop, and then just use this as a
beefcaked out little external hard drive. All you need is a network switch.
I am curious to see how it'll handle video editing, though. As it turns out,
the entire editing department is on lunch right now. So, [snorts]
I guess I get to do this. [laughter] I am scrubbing. I am starting to thing.
We've got our Apple Vision Pro video here. This is the Facebook version of
though, hence the super obnoxious aspect ratio. I can't even tell what the heck's
going on. People watch videos like this. This is terrible. But, you know what?
Isn't the NAS? Why don't we try 1/2
resolution? It's not the fastest thing ever, but realistically, this is
reasonably heavy 4K footage. This was such a great moment in this video, and
you can't really appreciate it at all because stupid aspect ratio. Yeah,
Facebook. So, it's pretty great. And if Open Media Vault isn't your thing, El's
list of supported OSS includes versions of Debian, Friendly Wr, Ubuntu, and even
Android. So, what are you waiting for? It's a line of sized NASD that can scale
up to 32 TB of storage with a topsp spec
price of $160 if you're okay with doing a bit of work.
And the value is especially apparent when you look at the cost of the larger
storage plans from the major cloud providers. Google, for instance, wants
$600 a year for their 10 TBTE cloud
storage plan. That means it would take less than a year and a half to pay off
this exact NAS in this configuration
with all the SSDs. And that's with us going full LTT and making a solid state
NAZ. So, what can I say other than I
give a strong recommendation to this small boy, just like I give a strong
recommendation to this small boy. If you guys enjoyed this video, go check out
the 90 TBTE NVMe server that I ended up building and not taking home to my
house. It's kind of the opposite of this, but it's still a fun educational