FAQ or more details on contributing to MD@Home?

[mimisan]

I can't believe I only just found out about MD@Home. I have more than enough bandwidth to spare and quite a lot of spare hardware sitting around the house, plus some raspberry pi units too.

It would be good if there was an FAQ page or something that collected ALL information relevant. I've had to read posts to find out that Raspberry Pis are probably not suitable and external HDDs don't meed the file transfer requirements...

Going by what info I have im guessing my old hardware probably isn't the right choice for hosting MD@ home? (I have some pentium4, core2duo, PCs and laptops lying around with IDE or SATA1 HDDs). Im even considering setting up a VPS to contribute if I can find a SEA host that fits a budget I'd be prepared to pay. Though the requirement for a speedtest.net test is definitely a problem for setting up a server. I'd have to setup an OS with GUI + VNC and a browser just to do the test which is kind of a waste of hardware resources for a server...

Anyway some questions that would be good if there was a central page to get answers to:
[ol]What OS are supported by the home client?[/ol]
[ol]Any hardware recommendations? CPU, RAM, HDD/SSD speed requirements?[/ol]
[ol]Is there a way to estimate the hardware requirement for a specific bandwidth or disk space allocation?[/ol]
[ol]Is raspberry pi suitable or not? Are external HDDs suitable or not?[/ol]
[ol]Can we run the client through a VPN for privacy/safety?[/ol]
[ol]how is disaster recovery handled? especially for headless setups? Can the client be configured to run at startup? What happens if you power down? Do we need to provide 24/7 availability etc?[/ol]

 

[BraveDude8]

@mimisan https://mangadex.org/md_at_home

In no particular order; anything that runs Java, I have two nodes running on ten year old Atoms with random hard drives so a Pi is probably capable but I'm not sure, external HDDs aren't suitable for anything because USB kills random read/writes and you really want to hook the drive up over SATA, it doesn't specifically need to be 24/7 but it needs to be on something that's intended to be online the vast majority of the time, as long as you can start a .jar in whatever way you choose it's resistant to random shutdowns.

 

[mimisan]

@BraveDude8 thanks for the reply! Well if USB hard disks are an absolute no go then a raspberry pi is definitely not going to cut it. The fact that you can run it on 10 year old atoms suggests that not much processing power is required and my 20 year old pentium 4 might be able to do it too haha!

Still any indication of real world read/write taking place? Typically a USB 2.0 external drive would get speeds of around 40 MB/s, but thats sequential not random.