Ceterum (autem) censeo Pomum esse delendam.

i set up a wildly op little NUC with a 24T DAS in RAID for like $900, all in, but just a straight NAS of similar volume could probably be done for like $400 or less, i bet?

my little rig is like a project and appliance box for seedbox/media services and like future weird home automation b.s., thin clients and other shit TBD. its my speculation that, rather than several true full computers, a less expensive and more resilient system will have a single home-appliance server and then scattered screens and thin/zero clients for shit like browsing/email, media/game streaming, and ebook reading.

or at least, that's what im going to build out for, I think.

i am defining resilience as usefulness even if the internet link goes down. like can i still watch movies, read ebooks, fuck with the internal climate control / read external and high tunnel thermostats & weather data log, etc etc if somebody gets drunk and slices the neighborhood fiber cable or i forget to pay my bill or like Balkanization Cool Zone shit lol.

the amount of cool/fun home tech that becomes pointless without an active internet link annoys and concerns me.

If your goals are:

1. reliable photo hosting 2.relatively simple setup and maintenance
2. affordability

You could easily get away with something like:

*NB: prices are estimates in US$ and GB£ and based on my last time getting stuff like this. * It'll be enough for Immich (albeit maybe a tag sluggish) and 500GB is way more than most mobile cloud services offer. Once set up they're pretty low maintenance too, bar the rare OS update or software hitch.

You can even get a decent NAS with redundancy for a similar price, but slightly larger and power hungry (though my chunkier system with 6 drives doesnt cost more than £1/day to run i dont think)

I ran Plex and Nextcloud, two pretty intensive services, from my 4B for years and only moved to a dedicated system last year to allow for 5+ streams concurrently (I share my Jellyfin with family n friends 🫶)

I couldn't tell you what I've put into my server because I haven't kept track. But you can do it really cheap, I just went more robust than necessary, built a rack, separate firewall, more storage than I need for the future while I could afford it. Buy used, or recycle your own old hardware. Computer recycling places are great for this.

$100-$200 for a server with a SAS backplane, then $5-10/tb for storage using used SAS HDDs, plus $15?/month for power if you need 24/7 uptime

Scolding people who doesn't do backups. Even hosting all locally if you don't want to lose 20 years of files you do backups.