Yeah it definitely a good option depending on your local used market and or what you can find on eBay.

Nah mine draw less than 10 watts at idle, unless you’re constantly loading the cpu you’re not going to see even 25 watts.

I’ve got three different sff desktop units running various apps on them. If you look around you can usually find the tiny form factor business desktops from Dell, HP, and Lenovo used and a few years old for under 100 bucks a piece. The most expensive of the three I bought was a Dell with a 9600t for 90 bucks about a year and a half ago.

My NAS is on an embedded Xeon that at this point is close to a decade old and one of my proxmox boxes is on an Intel 6500t. I’m not really running anything on any really low spec machines anymore, though earlyish in the pandemic I was running boinc with the Open Pandemics project on 4 raspberry pis.

I bought a Grandstream GWN7660 last year and it seems pretty good, it replaced a ubiquity WAP that I still have legacy devices connected to.

I work in retail, but my homelab isn’t super extensive just a nas, a Plex server, and a couple proxmox boxes.

Closet I’ve ever come to being in IT was back when I was still in college and took some a networking class and some web development classes but that was many moons ago.

This the route I went too, a couple years ago I found a tiny form factor Lenovo with a 6500t on eBay for a little under 70 bucks shipped and then I found a tiny Dell with a 9500t on my local Craigslist for 100 bucks.

They’re good little boxes.

Every wireless mouse I’ve ever owned starts double clicking after like a year and a half or two years. The only exception is the Razer Basilisk I bought about 3 years ago, that ones still ok so far

Thanks for believing in me child.

Piracy has never been theft, it has always been and still remain copyright infringement. That being said go ahead and pirate, I’m not your dad.

I didn’t even know jellyfin had hw transcode till this post but I’m with this guy, Intel’s qsv is great. I have my plex server running bare metal on an gen 2 HP chromebox. It’s dual core but hw transcode with Intel QSV will do like 20+ 1080p streams.

For a while I was running a “cluster” of 4 raspberry pis on POE running BOINC. Not super fun but was something to do with POE.

My original plan was to netboot all 4 and run them diskless with POE power but I never got around to setting up netboot.

Ahhhhh, ok.

Man, 17 bucks per drive is pretty steep.

This is the way I went, I got the tiny form factor versions of a Lenovo and Dell business desktops for about 100 bucks each. If you get lucky you can find real good deals on these things most will take a 2.5" drive as well as a m.2 drive, and they’ll fit upwards of 32 or 64gb of ram depending on the device.

I agree something isn’t right, I have Plex on an HP Chromebook G2 with a Celeron 3865U, it’s a 1.8ghz dual core without HT, and I had it doing like 15-20 1080p streams during testing. Quick sync is amazing.

4s were pretty easy to find pre 2020, I bought one at launch and 2 more before the pandemic hit and I never paid more than MSRP for any of them.

Yeah there was a bootloader update a few years ago, it might be only for 3 and newer, but it enables booting from USB and the network.

The middle and left monitors are both horizontal and the right monitor is vertical

I’m chaotic neutral but with a third monitor on the left.