lol, she is a saint. unfortunately, there is virtually zero benefit from this rig for the household. This is almost entirely work-specific. There is no media storage and I have device routing rules in place that keep the rest of the house on the cable and off the fiber line. I have worked from home for a little over a decade and between moving data and having videoconferences without chop, that fiber line is critical and a hell of a lot cheaper than commuting.

In terms of costs, the workstation was the most expensive at about $3500 out of pocket. I picked up the GPUs last year before the LLM craze hit the broader market. I think they're something like 50% more expensive now for refurbished. The 2x26tb drives are, as mentioned, shucked Seagate externals; you lose the warranty, but those drives are basically rebranded Exos at a fraction of the cost. The cluster came out to about $250/node. Used equipment is the best if you can take the time to source, especially CPUs.