Hyacin (He/Him)

I mostly agree, and did the same with my second gen lab build - instead of shiny new NUCs like I had used round 1, I bought old off lease Dell Xeon boxes. SO MANY PROS -

• Got them up to 14c/28t each
• They can take GPUs and actually do heavy transcoding/ML work
• They can take up to like, 128GB of memory, which is GREAT when they’re all hypervisors

The downsides can’t be denied though -

• Even without the GPUs and beefed up CPUs, they are power hogs - the CPU alone uses more than an ENTIRE NUC
• They run HOT
• They run LOUD

The same holds true for off-lease SFF stuff, Lenovo and the likes …

So while reuse/repurpose is absolutely of the utmost importance, no question - when it comes to technology and how quickly it advances and miniaturizes, a thorough and logical pros/cons list is often required.

I’d add another option though - if you do need what a Pi brings to the table - do you really need a shiny new Pi 5? Is it possible a used Pi 3 or Pi 4 would do the trick, and check the reuse box?

Cloud backups, AWS, because they’ve feed me piles of credits (less so lately though) so it’s practically free.

I back very little up to the cloud though as it’s so expensive. Basically just the storage of my local Git server which has all the configs, app and microservices I’ve built for my home automations and lab. Syncs straight from my NAS where the Git server is hosted.