[KolenCh]

I think there’s a spectrum and you said it as if there’s only two sides.

For me personally, I built my “data centre” as cheap as possible, but there’s a few requirements that the computers you’re using would not cut it: storage server must be using ZFS with ECC. I started this around a decade ago and I only spent ~$300 at the time (reusing old PSU and case I think).

There are many requirements of a data centre that can be relaxed in a home lab settings, up time, performance, etc. but I would never trade data integrity for tiny bit of savings. Sadly this is a criteria that many, including some of those building very sophisticated home cluster, didn’t set as a priority.

[winstonwinston]

Press X to doubt. I also use 150$ NUC for over a decade at home. At first it was ext4 then xfs, without ECC memory..

It looks to me, and i could be wrong, that many “homelabbers” upgraded from hoarding dvds to hoarding docker containers or whatever.