11–13 of 13 posts
I suggest that you pick a project, and get it done. Use the most common hardware you can. Buy a labeling machine and label everything that is not known good. If you have SD cards, label cases explaining what is on them. Get a large HDD in your desktop PC (or some kind of mass storage) and back up pics, notes, code, etc. Keep it forever. Keep at least 2 copies of it. Buy plenty of plastic drawers. https://www.google.c…
If you wanna scale up, you could re-use the Dell T20 as NAS only device and buy a more powerful server hardware.
You could also get one of these lenovo mini devices as a server, but I invested some more money and got myself a still cheap but very power efficent Fujitsu D3417-B2 Board about 9W idle.
See e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MucGkPUMjNo
As Software / OS you could start with TrueNAS Scale or Proxmox.
You can find great deals on powerful PCs from eBay sellers who are IT recyclers.
I’ve found the SFF/Mini PC’s to be great.
You also have to decide what you want to do. And if you want the headache.
For example it’s easy to start doing home automation, dns server, NAS. When things break or updates break things and nothing is working and you have to pull it all apart again was to much for me.