Jarsky

You could run Llama 3.1 8B or Qwen3.5-4B. Ideally you want at least a 12GB card, preferably 16GB. With less than 24GB VRAM, you’ll still likely want to offload heavier coding/reasoning tasks to cloud models like Claude Sonnet or OpenAI’s Codex/GPT models.

I use Navidrome. They have a Docker (e.g UnRAID), you can either use the web portal (I just use the web app) or you can use an app like Symfonium or Amcfy.

That doesnt explain the trend upwards in drive prices. People who buy drives larger than ~8TB are generally using them for mass storage like NAS. You can see here the trend im talking about (This is the renewed Exos 16TB). As stated above, if its a supply/demand thing; its people buying them in the thousands affecting price; not people buying a couple here and there. Meanwhile; the renewed Exos 24TB has been steadily dropping, then far more consistant apart from a brief spike for a few weeks.

I think this is more the answer I'm looking for, that's a good point! Some of these AI models require big storage

The only reason I bought 16TB drives a few months ago was to replace some of my 8TB drives in my array that already has 16TB drives in it. I did notice the price hike from $220 (or less), but bought them anyway because I ran out of space. Went to buy a bunch more 20TB today for my new array, but for the $17 price difference I'm just going to get 26TB drives. But to my point, why are people buying them at that inflated price, unless they just need to replace a failing disk. For the 16TBs, for $40 more you can get 33% more space per disk. I understand storage, I have half a petabyte and I work in enterprise so I get the supply. But these were in huge volumes the last 2 years at a much lower price. Just don't see why they're getting the sales to keep prices high at $16/TB.

Has anyone else noticed the incosistant pricing of higher capacity drives this year? This is around Renewed/Recertified drives; generally the price on lower models will fall a bit when larger capacity drives become more abundant. Heres some of the prices I paid on larger drives: July 2025 - Seagate Exos X18 16TB - $257 ($16/TB) June 2025 - Seagate Exos X18 16TB - $256 ($16/TB) December 2024 - Seagate Exos X18 16TB - $166 ($10.3/TB) November 2024 - Seagate Exos X18 16TB - $219 $13.7/TB) August 2024 - Seagate Exos X22 20TB - $254 $12.7/TB) November 2023 - Seagate Exos X16 16TB - $240 ($15/TB) Todays price (eBay/Amazon): Seagate Exos X18 16TB - $250 ($15.6/TB) Seagate Exos X22 20TB - $320 $16/TB) On Reddit discussions I could see these going for more like $210 & $270 accordingly just a few months ago. What I find crazy is when you compare these larger capacity drives available Todays price (Bigger/Newer Drives): Seagate Exos ST26000NM000C 26TB - $337 ($13/TB) Seagate Exos ST24000NM000C 24TB - $290 ($12/TB) Seems the X18 16TB should be more like $208 and the X22 20TB should be more like $250 to stick around the same $$$ per TB as the newer bigger drives. They certainly should be less than the 5-12% price difference compared to drives with 4-8TB more capacity and 1-3 years newer. **All prices in USD**

No; build the new array; setup your shares; then copy all the files over to your new array. Once all copied then you can move all the 8TB disks over, pre-clear them and add them to the array as data disks. Theoretically you should have a parity disk for every 5 disks; I generally run 1 parity for every 8 disks. One is fine. UnRAID doesnt use RAM for anything (other than to run in memory), a couple of gigs is fine; but you might want to run Dockers or VM's which will require RAM. Depends on the speed you need. If its archival with low writes; then no need to add complexity. SSD caching in UnRAID acts like a virtual space; and has to *offload* to the array with a timed mover process. It's not a true CoW Cache that persistantly writes from the cache to the array. Are you saying you have another machine you move to/from? Moving around the same share is basically instant (depending on your disk rules). **The replies are based on using UnRAID's own feature; ZFS is another story which UnRAID also supports**

Yes; it needs to be in UEFI to install and boot.

If you want to separate them and destroy the RAID; you use Option 2 "Delete RAID Volume"; and set the BIOS mode to AHCI or SATA. That is the only way you can boot a Legacy style OS. To use your RAID; your OS has to be installed in UEFI mode. Its the only way it will work with Intel RST. I cannot tell you why your Ventoy won't boot in UEFI; as it should support both Legacy and UEFI. I've never used Ventoy. Have you tried creating a Zorin OS bootable USB instead?

Your Legacy OS cant be booted from your Intel RST raid. You have to destroy the RAID; change your BIOS setting to AHCI; and put in your USB installer stick and reinstall it again in Legacy on a single disk. Or you install it in UEFI mode.

Looks like you have 2 x mSATA that make up a 256GB "drive" using Intel RST. Anyway, in order to use Intel RST raid; you have to use UEFI. You can't use it in Legacy (BIOS) mode. If you want to run a Legacy OS; you'll need to "destroy" the RAID in the RAID menu in your last pic; then in the BIOS change your Interface from RAID to AHCI or SATA. That means you will have 2 x 128GB physical volumes instead of the 1 x 256GB logical volume.

As I said before; WinSCP is more of a power tool; the CLI mode is designed for automation. It purposely ignores the Welcome Message / MOTD and falls straight into cmd. If you're determined to see the Welcome Message you should see it in the system log. You should still have a prompt to input shell commands. Also the fact they're both Windows; if you're just transferring from 1 PC to the other; just use CIFS (Windows Filesharing). You can mount your share as a disk and just drag and drop; browse files; etc...

Why not just build your rack system later if you do decide to have more files for others? You're literally adding cost, power and overhead by having another unit where power cost was your primary concern. Considering theyre files you're working with on your PC; it makes sense to just have the storage in your PC. Also why use an SFP+ card instead of just copper (ethernet) if a board can come with 10gbE? You can use a SFP+ to copper tranceiver on the switch. Thats exactly why all my appdata and profile are on a secondary partition, and my game files, video projects, etc...are on another NVMe. Reinstalling an OS doesnt touch any other drives but your OS drive. Reinstalling isnt the *fix* for sluggish systems. You probably have too many processes/handles running which you can review by looking at details in Task Manager and see what background processes are running and disabling/removing those which you no longer require. Operating Systems don't inherintly get slow on their own; its an accumulation of what we do on it. An hour once a year will stop you from feeling the need to reinstall.

Personally; Plex. Why? I already have a lifetime license I like the intro/credit detection Good community support around integration for other tools etc.. I have quite a few people on my Plex; and it would be a headache to move them over to something else even though Emby and Jellyfin have caught up on a lot of features. I think that Emby is better though; primarily for its efficiency and transparency at quality switching and subtitle toggling. Piracy has been growing again for a couple of years due to the increased price and the streaming platforms buying up rights for everything (e.g Sports) and not selling rights to other platforms to play their content. The main driver? Big hollywood companies over the past decade have been getting bought by Private Equlity firms. MGM, Skydance, Legendary, Candle Media, STX Entertainment, A24, Lionsgate, etc...Theres also studios stood up by the likes of Witherspoon, Smith, The Rock, Ryan Reynolds, etc...that are funded by these Private Equity. These PE's bankroll the production; then sell them to streaming services for inflated prices which forces the Streaming Services to raise their subscription prices. Much of the mainstream content is backed by a handful of PE's; they dictate the market price.

Really many modern processors are powerful enough. Embeded boards arent going to give you a lot of flexibility but they are very efficient; and I assume hardware cost is a factor since youre considering power costs. Something like a Topton MW-N100-NAS board has 8 SATA ports; and 10gbE. Its worth considering many boards like this one (which uses the Marvell AQC113C) do have 10gbE controllers which may not have drivers on every OS. This one though does support debian based distros (like TrueNAS Scale). Consider if you want this network attached; you also need a 10gbE capable network. The most efficient thing for a single PC? Just put a large HDD in your PC.