[bayindirh]

Another part of it is the ability to play with enterprise hardware. That level of hardware has so many features which is cool for the technically inclined, but useless for a normal home user. When enthusiasm hits resources and the desire to acquire knowledge, this happens sometimes.

I have seen a couple of guys who acquired older generation storage "racks" which they "play with" in the weekends. Do they have the cooling? No. Does it affect their electricity bill? Very. But they want to learn that thing and want to play with it, which is understandable, as long as it's kept checked.

Not different from audiophiles who lose their way, actually.

I was a wannabe data-hoarder by accident, but I understood why I'm doing and decided to slim down drastically. I'm merging, deduplicating and deleting data step by step, because many of it is my own files from the days of yore, and I want to preserve some of them. To be frank, at this very moment I'm verifying that I have copied a bunch of files without corruption, so I can start working on them (sha256deep is an underappreciated tool).

Some of the datahoarders give me weird looks when I say, I'd rather have a single NUC with a couple of spinning drives for backing up what I care rather than having them all in a cabinet full of RAID arrays, but I already have them at work. I don't want another server at home (not because that I don't enjoy it, but I want to have some time touching actual grass).

[hsbauauvhabzb]

Fwiw you don’t _need_ to leave the enterprise stuff on 24/7, or have a huge hdd capacity (vs say $n enterprise drives of very limited capacity). It’s still gonna be expensive, but not silly expensive (and the ROI when you get promoted probably makes it worth it)

[traceroute66]

> you don’t _need_ to leave the enterprise stuff on 24/7

If you are using enterprise SSDs the you need to be aware that the JDEC standards[1] are such that the assumption for enterprise SSDs is that they are operating 24/7.

Which is why, for example, the standards specify "power off data retention" of 3 months for enterprise SSDs vs 1 year for client SSDs.

And conversely, for reliability, the standards specify "active use" 24/7 for enterprise vs 8 hours/day for client SSDs.

Like many things with ID, the choice of client vs enterprise SSDs is a 'pick two' scenario.

[1]https://files.futurememorystorage.com/proceedings/2011/20110...

[bayindirh]

In the post I have seen, where the guys got a single full rack and played with it on the weekends, running it for a day added a significant amount to their bills, so yes, newer systems are more efficient (generally due to compute efficiencies), but disks are disks. Spindles are not way more efficient than before.

On the ROI part, this is a case by case issue. I for one can do the "play" part at work, too. Also, I don't want to spare space for a 1U or 2U full-depth server at home. I'm not even adding disk boxes to this. I neither have the space, nor the desire.

[overfeed]

Traditionally, hobbies cost money. I'm yet to hear anyone harangue folk on the ROI of their sourdough, blacksmithing or Storm Trooper cosplay hobbies. Perhaps this hobby is a little to close to sysadmin work for some, but I'm yet to see single-user SaaS weekend projects catch any flak on HN yet, instead, they are celebrated in "Ask HN: What are you working on" threads.

The point is the satisfaction you get in return of effort you put in, and perhaps kudos from like-minded folk when you execute particularly well.

[bayindirh]

Actually, I can reliably say that hobbies have some ROI, regardless of the hobby even, because you're getting experienced in what you do and subjects around your hobby. On the other hand if you do a hobby for its ROI, it's not a hobby anymore. It's just training. I prefer to have fun, not to train like a robot for some stats.

Recently I have watched a couple of Venus Theory's [0] videos. In one of them he asked the question why you're doing the thing you're doing, questioning the intention of creation. Is it self-satisfaction, or validation, he asks. I'm personally on the former camp. I used to share what I do for just putting it out, and adding a couple of pointers to it. If anyone commented on it, it's great (hint: nobody ever did). Otherwise I don't care. Having no feedback doesn't stop me, because I do what I do, enjoy the process and just put it out there (now less so because of the AI crawlers, alas).

While I like working/playing with computers, I have other hobbies, too, and I find them equally rewarding, and I don't care about their costs.

I also do not belittle the people who buy racks of hardware for their home. If I was not at the point I am currently, I'd probably do it, too. I'm just lucky to have access to it already, not needing these screeching hot banshees at home. Trying to scale down into a pragmatic minimalism also is both a result and reason of swimming in cables and big equipment in a small space when I was a teenager.

So, I got enough of these things at home, and I prefer to use them at their natural habitat. That's all.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/@VenusTheory/videos

[hsbauauvhabzb]

Good for you.

[lanthade]

A couple decades ago I came into posesion of some late model compaq servers, some fibre channel equipment, and a stack of small FC disks. Thanks to my MSDN sub I then had the necessary bits to build a proper MS server cluster. Thanks to that home lab I build the experience necessary to land a very good job and eventually ended up as a MS Server Clustering SME for a giant tech company doing work for one of the major CC companies. Home lab can be great because you can just break stuff on purpose to see how things work and what system resiliency looks like.