Don’t forget about PCIe expansion. Just yesterday I got a FireWire PCIe card for 20€ to transfer old DV tapes to digital with no quality loss. Plug the card in and you’re done. To get the same result on a laptop I’d need a Thunderbolt port and two adapters, one of which isn’t manufactured anymore and goes for 150€+ on secondhand stores.

PS. I would remove “CPU heating” from your system if I were you :)

Looks great, maybe this will convince me to setup a music server to free up space on my phone :) One question, does it support browsing by album artist instead of just artist? I organise my music with Picard which moves features to the artist tag, which breaks up albums when using just the artist view. Great work either way

Samsung SSDs seem fine, I actually use one of the cheap SATA ones as a boot drive, but they had a firmware bug a while ago that destroyed 990 and 980 pro NVMe SSDs. And I dislike Samsung in general so I’d rather not buy from them if I can avoid it.

Great. What SSDs are worth buying then? Kioxia? Solidigm? Never going to buy WD, Samsung is on my shit list too but if there’s no other options left…

edit: just read that solidigm also exited the consumer business at the start of the 2025, amazing