It let's you choose your storage directory and upload/download to and from it over the internet. That's it!
VPN + network share...?
Right now I'm thinking $9.99 for a LIFETIME purchase DRM FREE. Is that reasonable?
From the single sentence explaining what it does, absolutely not. I can choose a directory and share it within 10 minutes.
Alternatively I was wondering if maybe instead I should try to sell cloud storage itself?
You aren't the first person to come up with this idea, nor will you be the last.
a way to finance getting deeper into it
Better finance some lawyers first. What are you going to do as soon as you get a DMCA notice? Or if one of your tenants store something super illegal? Lmao
Go back to our old system of duplicated external drives, with one living offsite.
That would be the cheapest method I suppose
assuming we'd get maybe 30TB per tape on the 18TB raw LTO 9 tapes
LOL. No. You're going to get 18TB per tape. If anything you're probably going to get less
Would then need to spend $5000-10000AUD on the actual hardware on top of the drives
You don't have to(?). You're only going to be servicing at 1Gbps at a time. Interface limitations aside, even a $30 raspberry pi can do that.
LTTs set up is different because they have high speed networking, multiple users requesting a ton of data all at the same time, and ZFS dedupe going on. You don't.
This solution we could potentially not duplicate the data to external drives though and live with RAID as only form of redundancy...
Not sure what this means
Another clour storage service?
S3 glacier is potentially a solution, provided you (or someone at work) is willing to put in the time and effort to read the fine print. I have a post here on the subreddit if you want a somewhat summarized version.
Even shorter version : 300TB = USD $300 per month. Every single terabyte you want to get back is $100 on top of that. Do the math on how much egress you need.
Oh, and again, don't forget to read the fine print. Because you WILL get screwed over if you try to use it as a drop in replacement for google drive.
Oh that's interesting and might be an issue with the OP's 50 year time line
This is not a question about how long data I put on the SSD’s will last.
Counterargument, you actually ARE. For example, the firmware is also stored on flash (albeit it's NOR instead of NAND as far as I know).
I have absolutely no clue how long NOR flash lasts, although I have heard anecdotally that it is much more reliable (and more expensive) than NAND. Hence why SSDs use NAND for mass storage, and use NOR for shit like firmware.
Is there any reason they won’t work after that amount of time?
Without that firmware it's not gonna do a whole lot lol. So I don't have an answer to your question, but I feel like it should also be considered.
There will be bottlenecks?
Probably? Maybe? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ didn't give a whole lot of information
PCIe 1x use 1gb/s
Pcie gen 3.0 x1 is 1GBps. Is both your slot AND your card gen 3 or higher? Older cards are usually gen 2
4 x 200 mb/s = 800 mb/s
Yes that is how that would work assuming the card uses gen 3... Although given the fact that you said theres 1 SAS port, I doubt its gen 3. Single port cards were mainly a thing on SAS 1/2 cards, which predominantly used PCIe gen 2.
I mean... As long as you can get it in there it'll run. Just not at full bandwidth ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
That's an HDD, much cheaper (like 5~6x) for the capacity than SSDs.
It'll work fine. As for 16 vs 20TB you most likely don't have to worry about it. Usually those "limits" exist because drives larger than 16TB didn't exist at the time, or they existed but the manufacturer didn't bother certifying.
The only actually limit for something like this is 2TB. If it says it can do more then it has no effective limit.
I will probably go with the ZFS file structure
What do you mean "think"? You don't get a choice on TrueNAS lol
How good is ZFS at redundancy?
The... Exact same as other RAIDs I guess?
With the HDD's how much redundancy will I need if I want to use one as a fail-safe if the other dies?
Minimum of 1? Not entirely sure what you're asking
Also, I have heard that to install TrueNAS you need 32GB ram. However I have 16GB ddr4 3200mhz, is this enough?
More than enough. I got it running on 2.5GB ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
and the other to use as a caching drive.
Caching does not work the way most people think it works on ZFS
Also, will I be able to add more drives (easily) with ZFS at a later stage?
If you buy in sets instead of 1 drive at a time, yes. If not, YMMV
If you just want to set the file size use one of the bitrate settings(?)
Isn't that what it does by default...?
/mnt/Storinator/NASty/Archive