Well if you want anything over 35 inches a TV is your only option. They don’t really make monitors bigger than that.

I guess the key is it has to be the same version of electron in the back end. If they change too much of it then how much memory can be shared?

Also usually cheaper components.

ITX boards tend to cost more than bigger boards, you’re limited to one slot, and usually the cases are super limited in size for heatsinks or other stuff.

Probably on older hard drives like that hardware raid won’t slow things down too much. But holy shit do hardware raid controllers suck with faster HDDs/SSDs. Also they obscure smart info from your OS so you need special software to talk to the raid controller to know if your drives are failing.

Otherwise they’re fine. If that’s what ya got that’s what ya got. Rung what ya brung.

If I had a nickle for every time something “supports Linux” but doesn’t actually work properly I’d have so many nickles.

Still to this day I cannot get reliable 6ghz wifi on my Intel NICs. Most of the time I get stuck swapping back and forth between 5 and 6 to the point that it’s slower than even 2.4. I haven’t tried the latest fedora so maybe that’s my ticket to good wifi?

But at the end of the day, there’s only one program in control of all the hardware.

Is there though? There’s a surprising amount of layers hidden away particularly in the UI. If any one of those layers fucks up then wifi no workie. There’s also like 700 programs that all do the same thing, but not all of them work. Very fun to find out that they changed X in an update and now all the automations you had set up need updating.

Maybe on a desktop with unlimited tdp available the difference is negligible. Assuming your iGPU is strong enough.

But on my laptop using the built in screen I lose about 10-15 watts of CPU power which depending on the load, halves my frame rate. simply pushing those pixels to my display uses 30+% of the IGPUs ability.

And that’s assuming that the program you want will correctly run on the GPU you want. I spend more time messing with the configs than actually using some programs all because notepad needs an rtx 4090 or a game needs intel graphics. When it’s plugged into the dgpu it always uses the “correct” GPU.

It’d be really funny if the AI bubble popped before they fully shut down Crucial.

Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

Windows search sucks balls and does stupid stuff like this all the time. Even when it’s not a web search it might open some file named terminal and not the program terminal. It does that to me all the time at work.

So I believe the Pi 4 was the 1st to have an actual ethernet controller and not just having essentially a built in USB to ethernet adapter so bandwidth to your HDDs/ethernet shouldn’t be a problem.

Streaming directly off of the pi should be tolerable. A bit slower than a full fat computer with tons of ram for caching and CPU power to buffer things. But fine. There’s some quirks with usb connected HDDs that makes them a bit slower than they should (still in 2025 UASP isn’t a given somehow) But streaming ultimately doesn’t need that much bandwidth.

What’s going to be unbearable is transcoding. If you’re connecting some shitty ass smart TV that only understands like H264 and your videos are 265 then that has to get converted, and that SUCKS. Plex by default also likes to play videos at a lower bitrate sometimes, which means transcoding.

There’s also other weird quirks to look out for. Like someone else was (I think) doing exactly what you wanted to do, but no matter what the experience was unbearable. Apparently LVM was somehow too much compute for the pi to handle, and as soon as they switched to raw EXT4 they could stream perfectly fine. I don’t remember why this was a problem, but it’s just kind of a reminder of how weak these devices actually are compared to “full” computers.

HBAs are cheap, IPMI isn’t at all needed under normal uses cases, and ECC is way overkill.

For most people a halfway decent PC that isn’t failing is plenty.

For backups it will be fine. Same for media storage. But if you want media streaming from the device (like plex) then you’ll want something better.

The GTX 480 is efficient by modern standards. If Nvidia could make a cooler that could handle 600 watts in 2010 you can bet your sweet ass that GPU would have used a lot more power.

Well that and if 1000 watt power supplies were common back then.

Most modern boards will. Also there’s integrated graphics on basically every single current CPU. Only AMD on AM4 held out on having iGPUs for so damn long.

There was a post a while back of someone trying to eek every single watt out of their computer. Disabling XMP and running the ram at the slowest speed possible saved like 3 watts I think. An impressive savings, but at the cost of HORRIBLE CPU performance. But you do actually need at least a little bit of grunt for a nas.

At work we have some of those atom based NASes and the combination of lack of CPU, and horrendous single channel ram speeds makes them absolutely crawl. One HDD on its own performs the same as this raid 10 array.

The 865 is 6 years old. That is very much old phone in a drawer category.

Really?!? The company that LTT has invested in might also support some problematic people?

If you’re not gaming then anything with integrated graphics should play 4k video just fine.

I can tell when something is going to make me hyperfocus on it. So if I have the time to do it I’ll indulge. Usually it’s until the end of the day.

If it’s at work that’s until 6-7pm when my internal clock says go home. If it’s at home it’s until I’m about to pass out. Usually at least an hour. Typically 2-3 depending on how interested I am. But sometimes longer…. Much longer.

Surprisingly the ram I bough earlier this year only went up from $670 to 1000. What a bargain!