u/B_Smoove513

I can't say enough good things about not only ThinkPads in general but this 6th Gen X1 Carbon has been my best ebay purchase yet.

From being my first dedicated server device to now being my otg client / light gaming (older titles like THUG, THUG 2, & Rethawed) / game streaming pc to being extremely light and portable I just don't know how to not praise this piece of technology.

This is my second thinkpad, I gave the first one to my niece because I know it'll last almost forever especially once I can get linux on it.

I'll probably be buying another just because of how good thinkpads are as devices just not sure which model or cpu architecture to choose depending on my use case I come up with for buying it.

I've always been good with computers & tech since my early teens but never really did anything with it. Years later and a lot of messing around has led me here.

Initially I started out with jellyfin and a few shows and movies on jellyfin hosted on servarr (by random chance BTW). Then once I found out what self hosting was and that there was a world of things to dive into / host, I dove head first into home-labbing.

Did some research before I just went with the basic "buy a Pi and get started" route since I started with gaming pc hardware. I had a set of goals and plan and after some ebay digging I ended up with the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon 6th Gen (came w/ charger for $200), the matching Lenovo Thunderbolt 3 dock and a 2TB external Seagate drive I had laying around and was off to the races.

After a couple months of me deploying almost everything from the awesome-selfhosted github I hit the ceiling of my ThinkPad's capabilities and it was time to upgrade. Migrated from the thinkpad to a purpose built 12 Gen Intel i5-12500 build along with a two separate 1TB drives (1 PNY ssd for boot and an old toshiba drive from another old laptop I had laying around (completely skipped the use the old laptop in the corner / on a shelf step) and the 2TB drive and was doing great for another few months and then it happened... My first catastrophic drive failure (2048 error if I remember correctly). The toshiba drive died on me which made the 2TB even tighter with an ever growing arrchive.

Time to upgrade again. After buying a 4TB Iron Wolf Pro from Newegg and meeting someone I met after reaching out on in a local reddit thread I was able to acquire a couple drives off of him (a WD Blue 6TB 3.5" HDD & WD Black 512GB SSD) for a grand total of 10TB of storage (decommissioned the 2TB external drive from the setup since it was a weak link) and things have been running smoothly since .

The 512GB SSD went into my gaming pc hardware and i took the drive that was in my gaming pc and put it into a different gaming pc so I could have two proxmox servers. Servarr in the ssupd meshlicious (for media / transcoding and game servers ) and Administratorr in the 011d mini (for dns/ad blocking, immich, and other "boring" services) and I use the X1 Carbon as my client device to access them both named Tetherr.

I've loved every moment of building and deploying and fixing crashes and reading logs and fixing broken services and networking issues and I can't wait to see what the future holds in store for me and my homelab & hopefully IT career one day.

Tell me about your journeys and what all y'all are running on your servers.