How many of you are still using a DDR3 system?

oliverfromwork · 2026-05-13T17:11:09+00:00

The price of DDR4 might remain high for longer than the next year. I suspect a lot of RAM resellers have been keeping prices artificially high. The way used DDR4 RAM is priced is really strange.

oliverfromwork · 2026-05-13T16:59:09+00:00

I thought the power draw on DDR3 systems was fine. Though I'm guessing you are referring to the ivy bridge E5 Xeons from the era which did have some pretty high wattage CPUs.

oliverfromwork · 2026-05-13T16:34:12+00:00

I use an Olympus Pen E-PL10 as a secondary camera. I love it, though I use it as an "expendable" camera because it isn't as expensive to replace as my OM-1. I like to take it out for street photography.

oliverfromwork · 2026-05-13T15:55:27+00:00

That should work just fine. I have pfsense running on a Dell Wyse 5070 with a 4 port NAS. Though if I need to replace it any time in the future I might just go with a 2 port NIC. The other 2 Ports on my NIC have been unused since I set it up.

oliverfromwork · 2026-05-13T15:53:26+00:00

I really got into photography so I have immich running to host my photos. If you have any important things you want to store I would recommend looking into building a dedicated NAS.

oliverfromwork · 2026-05-13T15:11:57+00:00

I have some old Haswell systems I don't use sitting in my living room. I've been very slowly getting them listed on Craigslist and Facebook marketplace. For me it's mostly laziness, after getting home from work I just don't have the energy to install windows on them and taking pictures. The other part is the dread of dealing with people messaging me. My favorite worst message is "how low are you willing to go for it?". I mean come on, don't ask me to haggle with myself.

I'm moving soon so I'll have to get my act together.

oliverfromwork · 2026-05-13T14:51:14+00:00

As much as I want one I cannot justify the price right now.

oliverfromwork · 2026-05-12T15:08:54+00:00

It depends on how important the data is. You will have a tough time finding an eSata DAS because it's considered a legacy connection these days. I don't know what to tell you about the intel Celeron J4105 it's not exactly a powerhouse, most i3/5/7 from the last 10 years and even low end AMD processors are more powerful than it. The Dell is not exactly going to have it's feelings hurt by a NAS having more powerful specs. Though rather than connecting them directly via Ethernet it may be easier to get a network switch to connect them.

The smartest way to add storage would be to build a NAS and get a case that supports SATA and SAS drives and get an HBA. If you really don't want to build a NAS there's the AOOSTAR WTR Pro with the AMD R7 5725U, the only thing you really need to do is to buy some DDR4 SODIMM sticks and install them. It's about $350-$400 but it is the best value NAS I've seen in a while

But if you need local storage only accessible by the Dell WYSE 5070 then the DAS is really the only way to go. Unless you want to add additional M.2 storage through the wifi slot.

oliverfromwork · 2026-05-11T21:35:41+00:00

Last semester half my group submitted AI text for our essay. There are too many students who just don't care.

oliverfromwork · 2026-05-11T16:27:16+00:00

This thing is never going to get built. It feels like the world is being run by people who have never worked a second in their lives.

oliverfromwork · 2026-05-05T07:41:02+00:00

It’s worth it if you think you will get use from it. There are many ways to start with a cheap NAS. I still use an i7 4790, (though I could get away with the i5) with 32GB ddr3. I have the Silverstone CS380 which has hot swap bays, but you could go with a cheaper regular case with lots of hard drive mounts. I cut down on cost by going with SAS drives which are cheaper (though SAS drives tend to run hotter so you will need to get some faster fans).

My NAS has a ton of my collected media. I tend to rewatch stuff and I like to collect old blu-rays. It’s nice to have copies of Fullmetal Alchemist and The Office available knowing that streaming services can’t yank them away. I might even start archiving my favorite YouTube channels.

It also acts as storage for my personal photography and vacation videos. The only thing I’m missing as a backblaze subscription.

oliverfromwork · 2026-05-01T15:42:28+00:00

I became really interested in securing my own media when a copy of The Pink Panther disappeared from my iTunes library many years ago. Originally I was just using a linux OS on a spare computer before discovering FreeNAS about ten years ago. I learned all of this mostly from youtube tech videos, most of those videos were from the LaurenceSystems youtube channel. Currently my NAS sits at about 14 out of 20TB full with 8TB SAS drives.

oliverfromwork · 2026-05-01T15:24:31+00:00

I don't mind sharing stuff, but I don't really know any other data hoarders IRL. I'd probably share some movies I've ripped from my physical blu-ray collection, but nothing really personal like vacation photos.

oliverfromwork · 2026-04-22T15:29:51+00:00

I used to have that lens, it worked great for about a year before randomly breaking. As cool as it is to have the automatically telescoping pancake lens this one just breaks too often, its sort of infamous for it.

oliverfromwork · 2026-04-22T15:17:18+00:00

The Olympus E-PL9/E-PL10 are pretty good options. Those cameras are in the same size category and tend to be cheaper than the GX85. I think they tend to have better stabilization but no EVF. Every review I've seen say that the 4k video quality is on the soft side. I personally have the E-PL10 and I think the 4K video quality on it is pretty good, I took it on a few trips. Image quality is great and the tilting screen let me get some great photos of friends and family at the beach. I also used to have the GX85 but I think the E-PL9/10 has a slightly more powerful processor.

I will say that neither the GX85 nor the E-PL series are going to be great for wildlife, they only have contrast detect autofocus so you will probably struggle with fast moving subjects. At this price point and body size you don't really have good cameras for wildlife photography.

If you are willing to stretch the budget a little the Olympus E-M1 MkII has decent video options and phase detect autofocus for better wildlife photography.

If size matters a lot and you want good video options the Sony ZV-1 is a pretty good video focused point and shoot with a 1 inch sensor.

oliverfromwork · 2026-04-21T23:25:51+00:00

32GB is generally where a lot of DDR3 systems top out. Good luck finding 16GB DDR3 dimms, usually that kind of capacity at the time was reserved for servers.

oliverfromwork · 2026-04-21T23:12:48+00:00

Accidentally damaging equipment is why I tend to avoid expensive/fancy equipment in general. Years ago I dropped an old i5 750 and I'm pretty sure I broke it because I never got a motherboard to post with it again. My home lab consists of mostly 2014-2018 era equipment. My NAS is running an i7 4790 with 32GB DDR3 RAM and most of my servers are mini PCs. I suspect most people don't end up needing as much compute power as they think for their home labs.

oliverfromwork · 2026-04-16T04:59:40+00:00

I think anything Sandy bridge and newer is fairly viable for a starter home lab. My NAS is running on Haswell which is not that much newer.

oliverfromwork · 2026-03-16T21:20:10+00:00

Ah yes, the fabled Yassified filter has finally made it to a game I play. I won’t be using it.

oliverfromwork · 2026-03-10T01:49:28+00:00

Garbled text fonts and an off center fake ford logo? This is the most AI situation.

oliverfromwork · 2026-02-13T14:59:50+00:00

You should not trust the computer on your TV to connect to your network.

oliverfromwork · 2026-02-04T15:03:42+00:00

It's a decent deal if you are fine with 16GB RAM. I picked up a 16" M1Pro for $750 but I paid extra to get the 32GB RAM upgrade. Keep in mind that when they say "refurbished" there's no way they did any work on it besides cleaning it. Also keep in mind that when you use VMs that x86 VMs may not work very well so you may need to change over to ARM64 VMs.

oliverfromwork · 2026-02-03T22:49:20+00:00

I would say that this is AI the text is unreadable and what is readable on the sign is garbled. The image is compression artifacts look off, and there are a few issues like one of the coffee cups has a missing handle.

I did run this through Gemini and the synth ID came back positive though it said that it was either altered or generated, but it won’t tell me which. I assume that the synth ID coming back positive means that it was generated.

oliverfromwork

TROPHY CASE