Kon-Tiki

As I've mentioned: That's my guess. Since some time has passed: Did you check whether, after re-plugging your drive, the capacity is shown correctly now?

I partly agree. Before you remove the recovery partition, however, I would make sure that you have another recovery medium for your laptop (USB stick for instance). The purpose of the recovery partition is to help you solve problems that occur due to a defect in your main installation (on the C partition). So while you don't need the recovery partition for day to day use I would be careful to remove it unless you have, as mentioned, another recovery medium.

You are seldomly going to get the advertised capacity out of a drive, for instance due to formatting overhead and spare sectors (this applies to both HDDs and SSDs). This would explain why it says 500 GB total and 493 GB free when it is empty. As to why it doesn't show the reduced space after copying a file to it I'm not sure. My guess would be that maybe macOS only updates the free drive space information every couple of minutes or so. Just try waiting some time or re plug your drive to see whether this solves the free capacity problem.

As @RojiK said: There is no reason not to use it as long as it mechanically fits. The mounting points have not electrical functionality whatsoever.

DDR4 RAM won't work in a system designed to run DDR3. Frequency wise you have two options: Either buy two more sticks with 4 GB each at the same frequency you are already running at (saving you the money for 8 GB as you can continue using your current memory; you won't run quad channel, though). Or you buy two new sticks of DDR3 RAM with the highest frequency your mainboard supports.

No risk I would see. Motherboard compatibility is no problem. SATA is a standard which all motherboards support.

Sorry, I didn't read through your linked post (Now I did). In your first post on LTT you mentioned that you tried different monitors and that (with the exception of your parent's TV) neither of them solved the issue. Are these other monitors also 120Hz/ 144Hz displays? TVs handle image processing a bit different to computer monitors. That's why I was wondering whether you have (if you haven't already tried) a 60Hz monitor at hand to see whether that mitigates the problem.

That is interesting to hear. Have you tried capping your monitor's refresh rate to 60 fps and try movie playback again. Would be interesting to see whether it has an effect. Apart from that I agree with @Brok3n But who cares?. I can't see a reason for such a behaviour other than some weird "upscaling" from a low movie frame rate to your monitor's refresh rate (which would be suggested by your statement that SVP seems to mitigate the issue.

I would not assume that there is any risk. If your old laptop didn't produce smoke or smell electrically and there is no visible (electrical) damage to your HDD (like big black spots on the HDD's PCB) there is nothing I would worry about.

I don't play Minecraft (bad, I know ;) ) but depending which mods you have loaded I guess it would be possible. Maybe Minecraft simply doesn't need more GPU Horsepower.

That's the exact combination I use as well (also with a 1070) and it works perfectly fine.

Good luck If it doesn't work try a program like Etcher to rewrite the ISO file onto the USB stick.

So, digging into the user manual yielded the following sentence: This lead me to the assumption that there might be an issue with said GPT partitioning. Do you have another computer to try to boot of the stick? How did you "burn" the Windows ISO to the USB drive (i.e. which program did you use)?

Which mainboard do you have? Did you try another USB Port already? Also, make sure your USB stick is still working. I had a few occasions of sticks dying when used for installing OSs on them

You're welcome. Enjoy the build

If you don't mind setting up a NAS yourself a Pi is certainly a valid option. Combining it with something like OpenMediaVault for the software side of things should yield good performance and useability. As far as accessing files from from the internet is concerned you might need to install something with a web interface for file transfers like Nextcloud. Regarding RAID 1 you could use mdadm to create a software RAID.

OpenMediaVault (OMV) also is a free NAS solution coming as a ready to use OS. I've only experimented around with it a little bit but from my experience it is relatively easy to use. Your computer is very well capable of running it. Accessing wise you should not have any problem what so ever as OMV supports the SMB protocol used on Windows computers and can also be used on Linux and MacOS machines. As far as mobiles are concerned it depends on your device and the server software, though I'm sure there is a way to do so if you wanted to.

I would strongly recommend to perform a backup of your important data. Then you can experiment more freely and try to resolve the problem.

Glad everything worked out I might try setting one up myself some time

Have you unblocked your new SSH port for incoming and outgoing traffic? Try doing that and make sure you allow all protocols (TCP and UDP) for both directions.

If you have that much money to spend on a rig I'd probably replace the NVMe SSDs with something that can levitate the PCIe 4.0 Interface 3rd gen Ryzen supports (like the Corsair MP 600).

Glad to hear everything worked and I could be of some help Have fun with your server

AMD kindly supports ECC RAM on all Ryzen CPUs from 2nd gen onwards (I'm pretty sure even 1st gen but don't quote me on that). The limiting factor is the mother board manufacturer which has to support it. Motherboards like the Asrock Fatal1ty X370 Gaming-ITX/ac or the Asrock X570 Taichi list ECC RAM support on the product pages for example. However there are more mother boards also from different manufacturers that support it. Just keep in mind to buy a mobo with enough PCIe slots to get your hardware (GPU, storage card, maybe a 10 Gb/s Ethernet card) mounted (I'd recommend 3 physical PCIe x16 slots). Performance wise you should be good with a Ryzen 5 of the generation of your liking.

From my experience with virtual machines on a Ryzen 5 1600X a 1900X/ 1920X should do a good job for virtualisation. I don't know what you mean by using your VMs "heavily". If you're talking about multitasking it should be alright, if you're doing CPU bound computations I'd probably go for something newer. Whether you go for a 1900X or 1920X mainly depends on how many cores you want. Btw. I've seen new 1920X for as low as 215€ so it might be worth doing some research in that direction.

Depending on how "servery" your machine is supposed to be (e.g. IPMI/ lights out management port, ECC RAM support) you could go with standard desktop PC components and use a PCIe storage card to attach all your drives to the computer. If you're keen on ECC RAM there are also some consumer motherboards for AMD CPUs that do support this type of RAM. Case wise you can find second hand 4U server cases on ebay which you should be able to put large silent fans in and that support large numbers of HDDs. There is a video from LTT on this topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_B8AFvguqo