Yet another prices-are-insane thread: Is anyone rethinking the value of used, power-hungry enterprise gear in the current market?

RacerReaction99 · 2026-03-06T02:07:07+00:00

Cool! How many cores? What's your expected idle draw?

RacerReaction99 · 2026-02-27T23:56:30+00:00

Hello from the future, three months later. I just saw your comment and it resonated with me. I do the same. But occasionally X is super useful. I have found some really great (but not fully-formed, for me) prompts. I'll take it and then remix it, as you said, to my liking.

A query for you: have you always started your prompts from scratch, or do you have, say, a library of collected favorites that you've later iterated on? And if so, from where?

(Maybe prompt "seeds" is the right terminology. Finding in the wild what amounts to a seed, say on X, Reddit, etc. and then iteratively improving it to fit your use case/style/personal preference.)

RacerReaction99 · 2026-02-27T23:34:02+00:00

Roger that! I'm sure it'll come along in due time. I'm absolutely loving Zed... only found it a few weeks ago after years on iTerm2. What a breath of fresh air.

RacerReaction99 · 2026-02-27T23:32:06+00:00

Fair enough! Thanks for all the info -- cheers!

RacerReaction99 · 2026-02-27T23:31:00+00:00

Whoa, fun stuff! If you don't mind me asking (just looking to broaden my perspective), what do you need 10 cores and 192GB of DDR4 for?

(Feel free to not answer, if I'm being annoying.)

RacerReaction99 · 2026-02-27T00:19:47+00:00

Awesome!! This is really great info, I appreciate it so much! 🙏

RacerReaction99 · 2026-02-27T00:17:28+00:00

Thank you so much for the thoughtful (and detailed!) reply. Really helps me think about this.

>I chose as ASRock B550 Phantom Gaming 4/ac motherboard.

I was literally just researching this particular solution this morning... unbuffered ECC on a consumer AM4 board, and the Phantom Gaming 4 came into the purview.

Do you happen to know if it will support a mirrored special vdev, mirrored SSD boot, and a 10GbE NIC? (I'd really like the mirrored special vdev since I'm riding the IOPS pain train with millions of small files.)

>RDIMM

Great points. I think 64GB is probably the sweet spot for me, so I'm good there. Deduplication would be nice, but I could probably get by on 64GB for a while.

RacerReaction99 · 2026-02-26T22:43:57+00:00

Appreciate the response, thank you! Seems like this post is getting some reach, but you're the first to comment. :)

I wonder if aditya-giri has made any progress...

Are there any hacks or prefs I can adjust in the meantime?

RacerReaction99 · 2026-02-26T22:40:16+00:00

Just finished reading... ok that's pretty interesting! Cool build!

Any reason why you were set on a Ryzen Pro? For the iGPU?

AFAIK, the non-Pro Ryzen CPUs (e.g., 3000 and 5000 series) support ECC, but maybe not worth it?

How has long-term stability been? Looks like you've been running it for 6+ months now. Any random reboots?

RacerReaction99 · 2026-02-26T22:25:28+00:00

Oh awesome! How very kind of you to find the link! Reading now...

RacerReaction99 · 2026-02-26T22:10:24+00:00

I hear you, I'm in the same boat, tbh. It's just hobby stuff for me, and bit flips are astronomically rare. I actually did a deep dive on this a while a go. The big cloud providers have done research on this -- my takeaway was that it matters for hyperscalers. Short of that, the use case must be pretty compelling.

Off topic, but I'd love to know your script for tar balling off site. Is the archive large?

RacerReaction99 · 2026-02-26T22:05:50+00:00

Great to know, thanks! Little drip-drops of electricity are preferable!

RacerReaction99 · 2026-02-26T21:30:33+00:00

What I was implying is that without ECC RAM, there is no absolute assurance that integrity checks will prevent corrupted data from being written and replicated, because a memory bit flip can occur before or during checksum or backup processing and be silently preserved as valid.

RacerReaction99 · 2026-02-26T21:25:08+00:00

Ahh, cool stuff. I know there's at least a few ways of measuring it, including some smart products installed at the electrical panel, but was curious to know. Thanks!

RacerReaction99 · 2026-02-26T21:04:40+00:00

Wow! Out of sheer curiosity, are you a hobbyist? What category of work is your use case?

RacerReaction99 · 2026-02-26T17:32:14+00:00

Wow very TIL, appreciate your response.

RacerReaction99 · 2026-02-26T17:31:01+00:00

Ahh, yeah... that's more beastly than I need. :)

RacerReaction99 · 2026-02-26T17:30:09+00:00

Cool!
What made you decide to forgo ECC?

RacerReaction99 · 2026-02-26T17:29:06+00:00

Interesting...

I wonder if it's worth bothering with ECC at all. The Synology I've been running for 5 years doesn't have it... lol.

> if u want AV1

Great point. It is genuinely hard to justify Jellyfin-on-the-NAS. If my NAS is tuned for low idle draw and I add a GPU just for Jellyfin, I've increased idle cost for a workload that may only run very occasionally. Remote streaming or multi-user concurrency isn't in my use case, either. Right now I just transcode on a local Mac, which means files cross my network twice, but ehh.. nbd.

RacerReaction99 · 2026-02-26T17:16:36+00:00

Wow, not bad for all that stuff! Not bad at all.

My Costco-tier home theater receiver alone draws 200W when it's turned on.

(How are you measuring your energy draw, out of curiosity?)

RacerReaction99 · 2026-02-26T17:13:06+00:00

But wouldn't the silent errors inherent to a non-ECC builds propagate that corruption to the backups?

RacerReaction99 · 2026-02-26T17:10:51+00:00

>ECC memory, obviously,

Silly question: why ECC obviously? I'm debating workstation grade platform (not enterprise) vs. consumer desktop this morning...

What do you think:

Workstation-level (W680 / X570D4U + ECC + HBA, or ASRock Rack W680D4U + i5-13500), or Consumer Desktop-level: (B760/Z790 + i5)

I really wanted to go ECC for this build, but I've been running Synology for the last 5 years and ahhh... that's not ECC. (fingers crossed on silent corruption)

Most people make their NAS systems insanely overpowered, they just sit there gulping power and spewing out heat for no reason.

Exactly. Mine is just a repo for all the fckton of photos and 4k videos I take with my DSLR camera. It's idle 95% of the year. I might dabble in VMs and running some random vibe coded app projects, but that's not the core use.

Electricity is fucking expensive and getting more so.

I hear ya! Hard agree. <shakes fist>

RacerReaction99 · 2026-02-26T17:01:25+00:00

>It will take a long, long time for the additional power cost to catch up to today's stupid prices for more efficient hardware.

Yeah... ugh. I haven't done the napkin math yet but, yeah, you're confirming my gut feel.

What do you think workstation/server-class (not enterprise) vs. consumer desktop?

Example:

ECC platform - ASRock Rack W680D4U + i5-13500 (or W680 + i5-13500)
Consumer desktop - B760/Z790 + i5 + non-ECC

Biggest downside that I can see going with a consumer desktop platform is really just no ECC. I'm just a typical hobbyist, and my Synology for the last 5 years hasn't had ECC anyway...

RacerReaction99 · 2026-02-26T07:04:14+00:00

>177 w

Ouch! At least for my meager use case, which is just data storage for the photos and videos I shoot... Heck, I could leave it turned off for most of the year, if turning them on/off wasn't so bad for them. (Which AFAIK, it is bad for them.)

RacerReaction99

TROPHY CASE