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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: March 20th, 2024

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  • Facebook Marketplace is my go to here in the US. Pre built computers don’t hold their value for shit, so you can pick one up with a nice i5 or a medicore i7 office computer for almost nothing. Just look for Dell optiplexs or the HP/Lenovo equivalents. If you don’t need a lot of drive space (or are fine with external storage) those mini PCs litter marketplace and can go for stupid cheap.

    I’d target 8th gen or newer, ideally 10th gen, but one that comes with an i7 might cost a bit more than $300. You can always go with an i3 for now, then if you need more power then the non k i7s tank in value after a few years of being out.



  • Unless you’re hardcore I’d highly suggest not getting an actual server, especially a 1U server like that. Servers are loud, use a lot of power, and especially in 1U form not that expandable. CPU and RAM upgrades are cheap, but say you want more drives, or to install some weird expansion card it might not have the space.

    If photoprism is actually “AI” you’ll want a GPU to do the processing, and 1U servers limit you to oddly sized 1U GPUs. But considering they say it will run on a raspberry pi I’d assume any desktop with a core i7 would do the job. If you can find a desktop with 4 ram slots of DDR5 that would get you plenty of expandability. The DDR5 spec is rated for up to 512gb per stick, so assuming the memory controller (and bios) supports it you’d be PLENTY future proof. But even DDR4 with 32gb sticks should be plenty, and those machines are CHEAP.


  • My home server literally was just my old desktop for the longest time. I upgraded the components in my desktop, and put them into another case and that became my server. Proxmox is based on Debian so any remotely sane hardware should be supported well, then I just virtualize everything else (including the NAS) and hardware compatibility isn’t even a concern.

    My current case is a Fracal Define R4 which natively supports 7 hard drives + 3 5.25 slots so I could add hot swap bays there. If I need more storage I have an extra drive cage, and the suggestion from people online is to just zip tie it to the normal one, and that gets me 11 drives of storage. Sure it won’t look pretty, but it works, it’s cheap, and it’s scalable, and that’s all that matters.



  • Which cards are you using? Just because it’s samsung doesn’t mean it’s good.

    My dashcam uses mostly this “SanDisk 256GB High Endurance Video” SD card, and my backup is a 512gb Samsung Pro Plus (not rated for dashcam use). For anything that I want reliability I use one of these SanDisk cards, that Samsung, or a SanDisk extreme that I bought the other day. My “I don’t really care about this, but I’d like it to not fail” cards are Samsung Evo Select drives (or something green and Samsung). Only my “I really don’t give a shit about these” drives are those $3 Microcenter cards.