oh *hello* that sounds incredible

the worst thing happened to me just now, I had a tiny bit more than could fit in the two bottles so I had to pour the last few dribbles in a little glass and drink it just now. oops :')

haha yeah, it happening right in the middle of the Covid Time Compression Event didn't help 😅

he's five at this point, the deprecation has well and truly set in

...oh huh.

...

...huh.

that's fair!

this is the one I got FWIW, was about 20 aud cheaper in the UK. with a PSU I always at least make sure to get a reputable brand amzn.asia/d/f5CH6P0

delivery took about two weeks which is fairly standard to the UK. I don't know what it's like for Australia, but it arrived a few days before the shipping estimate, as have 90% of my orders. since Amazon's just resellers now I've started skipping the middle man if I'm not in a hurry 😅

I didn't actually think about this at all but it's soldered I think (comes with a fan pre-installed so I've never actually seen the CPU itself). treated it as a SoC of sorts and figured if I'd need to upgrade it I'd probably also want more from the motherboard too.

- for future storage requirements, consider refurbished enterprise drives. guaranteed not to be duds, built to last, 20-50% savings; but had I bought new I'd have gone for Ironwolves too

think that's about it! feel free to ama, I spent so much time on this and am more than happy to chat about it

- it's super annoying there are no high efficiency low-power PSUs (my NAS consumes 60w at full load and 20w at idle!) but I did the math and a fancy 80 plus PSU would cost more over its lifetime than power savings from the efficiency. went for a 350w bronze-rated one in the end

- yeah it sucks that the space on the boot drive for truenas will be 90% wasted, no reasonable way around it, just get the cheapest brand name SSD possible
- I went with a NAS-specific mobo+CPU combo from aliexpress and I'm glad that I did, it's really low power and gives me precisely what I wanted

I built a NAS earlier this year and spent SO MUCH TIME dithering just like you but I'm so glad I did it. various advice:
- if you get a separate SSD for your non-OS software, your HDDs can spin down and save power by idling when their contents aren't accessed (apps will frequently trigger R/W ops)

thank you very much ✨

❤️ thanks a lot Zach. miss your face always and forever xoxo