When they fail or when the capacity becomes a hindrance. Other than that if you follow your 3 2 1. You shouldn’t lose data.

Replacing after 50,000 hours in enterprise data center setting makes sense. At home it’s not too much issue for me to have a day of downtime replicating data back across drives. It’ll just cost me my time. In an Enterprise setting it will also cost you money. Possibly even enough or more to justify retiring them at 50,000 hours. Though again if you have raid setup with spare drives etc. You can just keep on running while the raid rebuilds itself. Only replacing a drive when they go bad. Or started acting up preparing to go bad.

It all honestly depends upon your it departments budget competence and staffing. It’s not wrong to replace some after 50,000. But it could be wasteful. There are after all people like myself who buy those drives and run them for years without incident.

Vibrational mode failure is more a thing in large SAS backplane enterprise jbod rack mount deployments. Small workstation/NAS deployments with three to five drives etc. Using rubber grommets and all shouldn’t have too many issues causing failure from vibration. However a large Bay full of drives spinning up and down reaching harmonics can absolutely tear themselves apart over time for sure.

In 40+ years of using HDD I can count failures on one hand. Generally related to power issues. I have many well over 70000 hours. I recently picked up 2 used 12Tb Enterprise drives for less than the cost 1 consumer 12Tb drives to add to the mix as well. I have another 8 to 12 decommissioned enterprise drives in different systems.

You never trust your data to a single drive or single medium. Otherwise effectively you’ve already lost it. And dollar per dollar SSD simply cannot beat traditional hard drives for capacity. Just seek time and transfer rate.

Just my music library is over a terabyte of largely 320 bits per second mp3. Storage for miscellaneous videos about six times that. And then my streaming library of video. Has been traditionally large enough to make re-encoding and shrinking worth while to get more. Upgrading from divix/xvid in the late 90s early aughts. H264 in the early 2010s. H265 in the late 2010s. Currently converting to av1 from source discs etc. Some of the spinning rust I am using has seen all those Transitions and been Rewritten many times. Which would have been very rough on an SSD. LOL I may have a problem.

Regardless there’s nothing wrong with any particular storage technology. No reason to avoid one over the other as long as it does what you need. And if you’re data is small enough to fit economically on an SSD then they will suit your solution perfectly. Just remember your three, two, one.

9th Gen isn’t bad. Though I’m guessing you probably still paid 200 to 300 for it. The problem with the i-5 is no hyperthreading. It definitely benefits a server system. But still will function nicely. And you would need at least 6th Gen to run NVME.

The 8Gb actually should be fine. I run kde plasma on an arm based Chromebook tablet with only 4Gb. Still have RAM to spare. So you can have a graphical desktop and still do plenty serving. Just make sure to check out the system. Either the OEM. Or the motherboard. Find out what Ram it supports and keep an eye on eBay. All the new systems with ddr5 should see a lot of used ddr4 coming up for sale at good prices. In the near future you can probably quadruple that Ram for 50 to 100.

The storage technology that you choose to use at this point should not be a huge factor. SATA SSD or nvme SSD you aren’t liable to notice a crazy difference. Either will be way faster than HDD. But generally create the base partitions your distro will likely suggest. If you’re just starting out there’s nothing wrong with going with that. Usually a 500 hundred to 1 GB boot / UEFI partition and then a few tens of gigabytes for operating system on the same storage device on a separate partition. If you have any remaining space. That would be a good spot to create a partition for home directories which are typically where you will store all your media or you can actually have a whole physically separate device another nvme or SSD or even hard disk to use as the home directories or storage for media. You can map them in the fstab file later fairly easily with the KDE partition manager or gparted.

No worries. And honestly if you haven’t already committed to a particular Mini PC or absolutely need the form factor. I’d seriously suggest looking on eBay for some old e-waste.

I personally run an old dell business system with a 4th Gen i7 with 16Gb of ram. Cost about 100 dollars when I got it. I run a Minecraft server, Luanti server, jellyfin for movies and TV streaming, icecast/liquidsoap/libretime to stream my own private automated Internet radio, and NFS/SAMBA for NAS. And I still have RAM, CPU, and bandwidth free on a 1gbps network.

The only thing a newer system will net you is possibly a bit more power efficiency. Which depending on electricity costs where you are might make a new system attractive.

Lol but getting into homelabbing, new or old; it’s still a gateway drug. One of my favorite BSD/Linux things. At least for hardwired clients is just having my home directory on the NAS. I have a…few systems, and being able to have my downloads and documents etc all right there. Being able to wipe and reinstall the workstation without worrying about my data if I want to distro hop. It’s great. Only downside that pops up rarely is file locking. Other than that my files and app settings follow me to all of them.

Honestly 10-20 Gb for OS. 200-500 Mb for UEFI. Everything else separate. A cheap SATA low capacity SSD is fine for the OS usually. Bulk storage is still cheapest on Hard Disk.

M.2 is great and all if you can afford. But unless your network is over 2.5 gbps or you are simultaneously streaming large video streams to multiple clients. Regular SATA drives will be able to keep up fine.

They can be made any size. Most SATA SSD are just a plastic housing around a board with some chips on it. The right question is when will we have a storage technology with the durability and reliability of spinning magnetized hard drive platters. The nand flash chips used in most SSD and m.2 are much more reliable than they were initially. But for long-term retention Etc. Are still off quite a good bit from traditional hard drives. Hard drives can sit for about 10 years generally before bit rot becomes a major concern. Nand flash is only a year or two iirc.

It’s an extremely shitty metaphor. But the ISA is the only open part. There already are and will be designs that will be licensed.

The beauty is, let them build highly performant risc-v cores to license. Everyone will win. As long as they don’t shove poison pill proprietary bits in it. If they do then no one should license or design around them. Because it will just create bugs and incompatibility. But if they want to be the go to designer based on the quality of their designs and not proprietary lock in. Let’s go.

WebKit was originally a fork of KDE’s KHTML and K JavaScript. So technically it’s a return to Linux at least.

100%. I wish I ever could have been as proud of any of our presidents.

In their defense, if everyone was perfect everything would be perfect.

But you’re absolutely right. As long as humans are human there’s no way to separate human nature from authority. And as a result, any system that doesn’t strictly limit scope and authority is inherently bad.

A Boltzmann brain is possible. Just not bloody likely.

Last I saw deepIn wasn’t far off. But it’s always been a similar project to KDE in many ways. (QT based, complete ecosystem including desktop and apps) Though they have had some rather staggering refactors between versions.

No. And there never should be. And here’s why. Bear with me for a moment but consider this. Part of the problem with this sort of thing is that people want their hands held. They want to be told what to think. Not to think critically for themselves. No matter how well intentioned. Such systems will always be sought to be abused. To manipulate people and their opinions. And at best they will always be subject to bias and blindness. The truly keep them from ever being universally useful.

Basic training and education in critical thinking skills will be far more to help people. Than relying on an app no matter how well intentioned to tell them how to think about something.

Communism is stateless and classless. How are STATES with authoritarian unanswerable leaders/classes in any way communist?