u/jamesbuniak

Subtotal’s at $750,085.93.

The bike is $85.99 of that. I’d like it on the record that I added exactly what she asked for.
Amazon’s offering me 0% APR at $62,507/mo though, so honestly this is just fiscally responsible at this point. “Only 6 left, order now” — they KNOW me.

Anyway the balance bike has Prime shipping by Saturday and the RAM doesn’t arrive til the 29th, so the toddler gets her hardware first. Priorities.

(No I didn’t actually buy this ram, the bike though 🤩)

The “rack” is a boltless steel shelf from Amazon, the kind meant for paint cans and storage tubs.

On it: six tower nodes, all running Proxmox, doing everything from LLM inference to Kubernetes pools, plus flash storage.

The whole thing is tied together with a $50 1G switch (I promise I’ll upgrade the fabric soon).

Things I swore were temporary: the wood framing, the cable management, the switch, the shelf itself. The shelf is winning. It’s load-bearing infrastructure now.

It honestly works. Boltless shelving handles way more weight than people assume, and tower chassis don’t need rails. The real problems are airflow and cable management, both of which the photo will confirm I have not solved.

So before I spend real money: know any better ways to store these? Towers, not rackmount, so a standard 19” rack is out unless I shelf-mount them anyway. Open to wall mounts, custom builds, “just buy X,” or being told the shelf is fine and I should stop overthinking it.

Friend has ~40 Xeon pulls to repaste before they go in production. He’s been handling them by the bottom because it’s faster. Wiped a few on his jeans when he ran out of paper towels. Using 70% IPA from CVS. No mat, no strap, table is wood, dog hair is a factor. He’s already installed about a dozen. How worried should he be on a scale of 1-10 lol

I bought the same 10TB HGST SAS drives on eBay in 2024:

-April 2024: $499.99 for 9 ($5.55/TB)
-Today: $1,749.99 for 10 ($17.50/TB)

Used enterprise drives were supposed to depreciate.

Hyperscalers retire them, we buy them for nothing, everyone wins.

That was the deal.

Then the AI people came back and bought their own trash.
I came to this hobby to escape the cloud.

The cloud has eaten my secondhand parts bin. I will be running TrueNAS on a Speak & Spell by Christmas.

Two years ago this entire pile was landfill-grade. Now it’s a score. The AI gold rush hollowed out the memory market and the sticks I used to skip past are suddenly the deal of the year. I’m supposed to be grateful.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Ok - so I picked the DGX-1 on eBay for an unbeatable price. Should I keep the spark? It’s so cute!