that hard drive prices return to normal and think about all the things i can build.
silliness aside, i honestly sit there and plan it out. i wish i pulled the trigger and started earlier. i actually bought two mini pcs before this mess and have one setup running proxmox. o have this beautiful jellyfin -> jellyseer -> radarr/sonarr -> sazbd -> gluetun -> newsreader setup on proxmox and i founf 1 8tb wd red plus on sale that i put in a ugreen nas running truenas and its filling up quickly.
i wont move to nextcloud until i get a second drive for mirroring. i still have to find a place to backup those future files as well.
there is not really a point tp this post except i know people here feel my pain. how i dream of buy a few 12 tb drives.
for now i find stuff and put price alerts on them. o have tried ebay but i dont always get what i pay for. like buying wlanlisting that says wd red plus cmr and getting a wd red (non plus) smr.
i fantasize about the cool rack setup i could build. right now everything, jellyfin stack, home assistant, glance dashboard, pteradactyl, netbird , anf any vm i want to play with all on one proxmox mini pc. next comes books
sorry for the rant but maybe you can relate
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I’m probably the only one here that looks at the stupid prices of hardware (RAM, GPUs, drives etc) as a fun challenge. As in “OK…shit’s expensive…what’s the MOST I can do with the LEAST?”.
I think that comes from spending time in the lowspecgamer culture, where folks (hello!) will literally recode the game engine, bridge motherboard pins with paperclips and drill holes into the PC before buying new hardware.
For example, I specced out a (very decent) “sneakernet” / internet mirror for myself, as an intellectual exercise…and every time I run the numbers, they go from 8TB on the low end to 16TB on the high.
That includes mirroring somewhere around 3-5yrs of YouTube videos (in glorious 540-720p).
I can (and do) host an obscene amount of stuff on a SBC with a 256GB M.2.
Given narrow jobs like DNS, VPN, media, sync, search and automation and you can do a stupid amount with pi4 4GB.
Same thing with LLMs. People try to solve the problem of LLMs with bigger models, bigger GPUs etc…and I’m over here thinking “actually, the LLM is really just the mouthpiece; everything else around it is just good old programming”.
Memory, search, STT and TTS, OCR, file tools…none of that needs to live in the model or chew up a GPU…and once normal software handles that stuff, the question becomes: how small can the LLM be and still be useful middleware?
Turns out…pretty fucking small.
Honesty, I don’t think prices are coming down any time soon (RAM, 8TB NVMe drives, Threadrippers, 25GbE gear…hell, I saw a Blackwell yesterday on “sale” for $15K USD) so we might need to get creative.
Personally, I’m building towards resilience and independence. My next DIY will be the solar system… and because I’m paring down my homelab significantly, I can get away with a micro-system for around $2K.
Do wish hard drives were cheaper tho. Might have to go back to my “DVD as back up server” idea.
TL;DR: the only way to win is not to play the game…or at least, play it by your own rules.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters DNS Domain Name Service/System LXC Linux Containers NVMe Non-Volatile Memory Express interface for mass storage SBC Single-Board Computer SSD Solid State Drive mass storage VPN Virtual Private Network ZFS Solaris/Linux filesystem focusing on data integrity
[Thread #86 for this comm, first seen 25th Aug 2026, 14:10] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
Only thing I wish for Christmas is to be able to replace the RAM and mobo in one of my servers. It is failing with a kernel panic about once a week and it is an old DDR3 platform I planned to upgrade back in January. I have isolated the issue to a hardware fault but left without a solution…
Try increasing timings on your RAM?
I’ll try that next time it dies, see if it helps
Actually I am really curious about this !
I’ll try to remember to update you in 1-2 months then!
Very kind of you, thanks!
Update, kernel panic happened today, so I updated the BIOS settings:
- tCL (CAS Latency): Change from 11 to 12
- tRCD: Change from 11 to 12
- tRP: Change from 11 to 12
- tRAS: Change from 28 to 32
- DRAM voltage changed from 1.488 to 1.530
All the initial values were Auto values. I’ll let it sit for at least a month with no reboots before calling it fixed. I’ll set a reminder
Vert interesting, thanks again for the update ! I hope these new settings will do the trick
