Adapter or caddy is fine. Can get them on most shopping sites for cheap.

IIRC from my old office PC slinging days, a lot of those cases with 5-1/4 bays usually had slots for mounting screws that would allow you to mount a 3.5 drive flush to one sideusijg 2 screws. Then you get 1-3/4" 6-32 screw stand offs, thread it into the drive, and use that to mount it to the other side of the 5-1/4 bay.

Did that a lot to really old reused cases where there were a ton of 5-1/4 bays but only one 3.5 bay.

Why dies it have to be such a pain?

Intentionally bad, if you buy Apple you’re supposed to use iCloud and never, ever leave the ecosystem.

Bigger hammer and a concrete surface. Three good whacks to the thin sheet metal casing (opposite the drive motor/PCB) should shatter the platters inside.
You can also buy a sharp punch that looks like this and punch thru the sheetmetal side to really get those platters broke.

Realistically if they’re already failed, nobody is going through the effort to send these disks through any kind of speciality recovery for a random john q public anyway.

Any normal computer can become a “server”, its all based on the software.
Most enterprise server hardware is expensive because its designed around demanding workloads where uptime and redundancy is important. For a goober wanting to start a Minecraft and Jellyfin server, any old PC will work.
For home labbers office PC’s is the best way to do it. I have two machines right now that are repurposed office machines. They usually work well as office machines generally focus on having a decent CPU and plenty of memory without wasting money on a high end GPU, and can be had used for very cheap (or even free if you make friends that work in IT). And unless you’re running a lot of game servers or want a 4k streaming box, even a mediocre PC from 2012 is powerful enough to do a lot of stuff on.

3 sticky notes telling me to “go get that incremental backup working”,
2 separate external hard drives,
1 month out of date

I’m currently half way thru building a ZFS array using (5) 8tb Ironwolf Pro drives. I’m modelling and 3d printing a custom drive cage with brackets to hold them all inside the shitty Dell tower case I have dedicated to it. Hoping I can get it done sometime Sunday, I’m on V2 of the drive cage print and it takes like 8 hours to do lol.

your hardware ain’t shit until it’s a first gen core2duo in a random Dell office PC and 2gb of memory that you specifically only use just because it’s a cheaper way to get x86 when you can’t use your raspberry pi.

Also they lie most of the time and it may technically run fine on more memory, especially if it’s older when dimm capacities were a lot lower than they can be now. It just won’t be “supported”.

If it works, it works. Really any old cheap pcie card will work, if you just need video out of any kind the card type need not be specific. Glad you got it to work.

Get a used SFF office PC low profile card off Ebay. They often have chipset wattages around 25 or so and easily run on slot power only

Something like this: https://www.ebay.com/p/1958445856 (idea only, not endorsing this seller).

Anything of a semi modern format with a pcie interface thata not an outright scam card will be fine for VGA no-driver video output. IME older AMD/ATI cards seem to boot better than oder NVidia cards…

The more they delete, the more they can resell every few years as “new” while charging ever more exorbitant prices for!

This being self hostable makes me instantly like this. Something like G photos that I could self host and dump a lot of shit off my phone storage would be amazing.

I’ve personally been using a Teamgroup 1tb from Amazon and a few KingSpec (from Aliexpress) 500gb SATA and PCIe M.2 drives for about a year and a half now without much problem or reported health loss. They are not performance winners of course but they still beat the pants off spinning rust.

YMMV of course, always keeps backups or don’t keep anything you’d be super sad to lose on them.

Absolutely. Don’t fuck with electrical.

Generally speaking most buildings can be “grandfathered in” under code such that it’s perfectly legal to rent as long as the electrical system functions and meets code for the year on which it was built or installed… shitty, but legal.

It will not affect system stability, but… Surge protectors do not work at all without a ground wire to drop excess voltage to. Any kind of line voltage disturbance could kill every device.

Additionally, without any ground wire to pull the housings of devices to ground, the potential for a short to energize the case and then electrocute you is also high.

additionally additionally, if you have grounded outlets that don’t actually have a ground connection running to them, that means either the wiring system is broken or it was “updated” by an unlicensed hack job who has undoubtedly made numerous more dangerous decisions elsewhere in the circuit.

If your house is entirely ungrounded you really should have an electrician come update it ASAP. Outlet grounds have been mandatory since 1971. The chances are high that wiring predating that code is still using old cloth-wrapped wire insulation or even knob&tube, both of which are huge fire risks as the insulation is decayed badly by now. It’s expensive to have all new wire pulled but it is necessary.

Don’t use a thumb drive, use an external hard/solid state drive or install an internal drive. Even an aliexpress 64gb ssd for $10 is better than any thumbdrive. Thumbdrive’s flash and controllers are not designed for OS level continuous writes and will die very quickly.

If you must use a thumb drive, add some kind of air flow over it, and disable all logging features in openWRT to reduce writes as much as possible.

The absolute best bang for your buck new GPU’s for decode/encode are Intel ARC GPU’s. They use Intel’s Quick Sync Video system which is some of the best supported encode/decode libraries out there, and they’re cheap.

An ARC A380 is easily had for $110, runs entirely off 75w PCIe slot power requiring no additional PSU wires, and supports H264/H265/AV1 encode. It’s a no brainer.

As long as it physically fits the slot, it should not have an issue with the lower PCIe bandwidth. The lower end GPU’s really need very little even for video encode.

The preloaded spyware OS is half baked, horribly unfinished, and also locked to the hardware. You can work around it to install your own OS but they provide zero support and explicitly say it is not supposed to be allowed by ToS while intentionally making it as hard as possible by making the BIOS inaccessible and digitally signed to their own OS. Fuck that.

The crowdfunding fundraiser (where there are zero penalties if things are shipped broken, incomplete or not at all) is super fishy and the non-discount price is astronomical. While the hardware looks nice… Hard, hard pass right now, stinks of vendor lockin and illegal data vacuuming. Do not buy.

Source video: https://youtu.be/Y_MgY7wgII8

me after 15 years of intermittent learning self hosting:

i have the one random office PC that runs minecraft

…yeah that’s it