After using my last post to think through my blunder of buying the geekwork case, it gets even worse, but I’ll get to that in a second. For my previous post I came to the conclusion that a normal Pi 3B+ hosting an access point is the correct way to go. And after creating the pi with the access point, I can see that if I need any extra space for Next Cloud or otherwise, I can either buy usb flash memory or a usb mSata drive. What makes all of this worse is that in the time I was waiting for my hard drive and geekworm case to be shipped, the prices of storage really fell out the bottom. In this short amount of time, several prices have been sliced to half making the trade offs of price versus space I was running into before a lot more one sided in the favor of flash storage. That being said with a 128GB usb stick now coming in at around thirty dollars, it makes it a lot easier to either pick up a stick, or maybe even hold out until there’s an even better deal down the line.

Which kind of leaves what to do with the alluminum case and hard disk I bought. After after thinking about it, I think the best use of the case and hard drive is probably to host a network storage drive up stream from my pi access point. This means that I should be able to get wired transfer speeds over the local network and then a pretty dedicated connection for the few clients I have connected to the access point. For a host I think I’ll use my tinker board, which kind of kills two birds with one stone, as the Tinkerboard has two gigabytes of memory and gigabit Ethernet, but it’s been sitting in my drawer for the last year, because it’s non-standard. So I can feel better about using all of the non-standard “junk” i have laying around to use the barrel jack to power the tinkerboard, to host the two terabyte drive on my network or act as a backup.