So I believe the Pi 4 was the 1st to have an actual ethernet controller and not just having essentially a built in USB to ethernet adapter so bandwidth to your HDDs/ethernet shouldn’t be a problem.

Streaming directly off of the pi should be tolerable. A bit slower than a full fat computer with tons of ram for caching and CPU power to buffer things. But fine. There’s some quirks with usb connected HDDs that makes them a bit slower than they should (still in 2025 UASP isn’t a given somehow) But streaming ultimately doesn’t need that much bandwidth.

What’s going to be unbearable is transcoding. If you’re connecting some shitty ass smart TV that only understands like H264 and your videos are 265 then that has to get converted, and that SUCKS. Plex by default also likes to play videos at a lower bitrate sometimes, which means transcoding.

There’s also other weird quirks to look out for. Like someone else was (I think) doing exactly what you wanted to do, but no matter what the experience was unbearable. Apparently LVM was somehow too much compute for the pi to handle, and as soon as they switched to raw EXT4 they could stream perfectly fine. I don’t remember why this was a problem, but it’s just kind of a reminder of how weak these devices actually are compared to “full” computers.

HBAs are cheap, IPMI isn’t at all needed under normal uses cases, and ECC is way overkill.

For most people a halfway decent PC that isn’t failing is plenty.

For backups it will be fine. Same for media storage. But if you want media streaming from the device (like plex) then you’ll want something better.

The GTX 480 is efficient by modern standards. If Nvidia could make a cooler that could handle 600 watts in 2010 you can bet your sweet ass that GPU would have used a lot more power.

Well that and if 1000 watt power supplies were common back then.

Most modern boards will. Also there’s integrated graphics on basically every single current CPU. Only AMD on AM4 held out on having iGPUs for so damn long.

There was a post a while back of someone trying to eek every single watt out of their computer. Disabling XMP and running the ram at the slowest speed possible saved like 3 watts I think. An impressive savings, but at the cost of HORRIBLE CPU performance. But you do actually need at least a little bit of grunt for a nas.

At work we have some of those atom based NASes and the combination of lack of CPU, and horrendous single channel ram speeds makes them absolutely crawl. One HDD on its own performs the same as this raid 10 array.

Apple was still selling computers with them built in in 2002.

Remember, USB drives barely existed back then, and they sucked. Floppy was all but dead. Burning a CD with your 1MB word file was the only way to move files back and forth for peasants.

Psh, casuals. I’ve been hoarding zip drives for years.

Honestly IDK how I keep getting so many of them, but they’re not very reliable so I guess I’ll keep them.

And when you see how bad their windows support is it’s a miracle anyone buys this garbage.

It’s a neat concept. But at the moment only Apple has pulled it off well. And that’s only if you stick with Mac OS.

I have a computer at work that has like 10 phones plugged into it. Opening “this PC” part of file explorer freezes it for about 5-10 minutes. It’s a very fun issue when I forget about. Normally I just avoid that screen.

It’s a fun bug.

https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9NMZLZ57R3T7

You can still buy it yourself. It’s only $1.

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Using an older OS is only a security issue if you actually do stuff with it. If you’re downgrading just to reinstall a newer OS then what malware is going to exploit your phone in that short period of time?

As others have said the real issue will probably be running old firmware for other things like your modem. But even then someone still has to be looking to explicitly exploit that.

Most current Gen. thinkpads have fully upgradable ram. The T4XX/14 series had half soldered ram until a year or two ago. SSDs have basically always been replaceable.

They’re also very easy to work on since it’s only a couple of screws and you have full access to the inside of the machine. Those older thinkpads were nightmares if you had to take the whole mobo out. Even MacBooks were easier.

You can only “roll back” to 10 if you just upgraded from 10 to 11. If you bought something new then you can’t “roll back” to something that was never there.

Also if it’s a newer laptop expect a lot of things to be broken or work poorly. A lot of new hardware has come out post Windows 11.

SSDs also have essentially no wear from reading.

SD cards just die out quickly because people don’t treat them the same as their internal drive. When you’re replacing the main drive to your most important machine do you go to aliexpress and sort by price low to high? Or do you do some research first and see if it’s a well rated drive?

SD cards are tiny so getting one in high capacities, speeds, and high write cycles is a lot harder without paying a lot more money. The SD cards I have in my dashcam have been recording 4k + 1080p video almost continuously for 5+ years and they’re still going strong. But I also bought drives rated for that kind of use.

Swap would probably destroy that thing. And be unbearably slow.

I agree with the others, a rescue partition type thing is probably the best option.

The case around it does. That’s what I want to replace.

That brings up my following question.

If the thumb sticks are capacitive and they wear smooth over time how do you replace them? Are the capacitive sensors under stick caps? Do you just have to replace the rim only?

What you lose shuffling between CPU and GPU you gain by not having your GPU and CPU sharing the same bandwidth.

Apple gets away with it by having an ungodly massive memory bus. I don’t think valve is getting a 512 bit memory bus on what’s probably a RX 7400/Ryzen 7600 tier CPU. Both of those combined would be like half that?