Bigger hammer and a concrete surface. Three good whacks to the thin sheet metal casing (opposite the drive motor/PCB) should shatter the platters inside.
You can also buy a sharp punch that looks like this and punch thru the sheetmetal side to really get those platters broke.

Realistically if they’re already failed, nobody is going through the effort to send these disks through any kind of speciality recovery for a random john q public anyway.

Any normal computer can become a “server”, its all based on the software.
Most enterprise server hardware is expensive because its designed around demanding workloads where uptime and redundancy is important. For a goober wanting to start a Minecraft and Jellyfin server, any old PC will work.
For home labbers office PC’s is the best way to do it. I have two machines right now that are repurposed office machines. They usually work well as office machines generally focus on having a decent CPU and plenty of memory without wasting money on a high end GPU, and can be had used for very cheap (or even free if you make friends that work in IT). And unless you’re running a lot of game servers or want a 4k streaming box, even a mediocre PC from 2012 is powerful enough to do a lot of stuff on.

3 sticky notes telling me to “go get that incremental backup working”,
2 separate external hard drives,
1 month out of date

I’m currently half way thru building a ZFS array using (5) 8tb Ironwolf Pro drives. I’m modelling and 3d printing a custom drive cage with brackets to hold them all inside the shitty Dell tower case I have dedicated to it. Hoping I can get it done sometime Sunday, I’m on V2 of the drive cage print and it takes like 8 hours to do lol.

your hardware ain’t shit until it’s a first gen core2duo in a random Dell office PC and 2gb of memory that you specifically only use just because it’s a cheaper way to get x86 when you can’t use your raspberry pi.

Also they lie most of the time and it may technically run fine on more memory, especially if it’s older when dimm capacities were a lot lower than they can be now. It just won’t be “supported”.

Get a used SFF office PC low profile card off Ebay. They often have chipset wattages around 25 or so and easily run on slot power only

Something like this: https://www.ebay.com/p/1958445856 (idea only, not endorsing this seller).

Anything of a semi modern format with a pcie interface thata not an outright scam card will be fine for VGA no-driver video output. IME older AMD/ATI cards seem to boot better than oder NVidia cards…

Don’t use a thumb drive, use an external hard/solid state drive or install an internal drive. Even an aliexpress 64gb ssd for $10 is better than any thumbdrive. Thumbdrive’s flash and controllers are not designed for OS level continuous writes and will die very quickly.

If you must use a thumb drive, add some kind of air flow over it, and disable all logging features in openWRT to reduce writes as much as possible.

The absolute best bang for your buck new GPU’s for decode/encode are Intel ARC GPU’s. They use Intel’s Quick Sync Video system which is some of the best supported encode/decode libraries out there, and they’re cheap.

An ARC A380 is easily had for $110, runs entirely off 75w PCIe slot power requiring no additional PSU wires, and supports H264/H265/AV1 encode. It’s a no brainer.

As long as it physically fits the slot, it should not have an issue with the lower PCIe bandwidth. The lower end GPU’s really need very little even for video encode.

If its just for her, I don’t really care what content I host for family unless it straight up nazi/gay hate shit. New age “found christian” movies are massive yuck, but innocuous otherwise. She’s gonna consume them regardless of whether you host them or not.

Move it to its own library, make sure to rip in low quality (480p low bitrate) so you’re not spending too much disk space in her, and let it be. It’s not worth driving a rift in the family over.

It is, I’m being tongue in cheek I’ve been to busy to finish the models lol

Oh yeah?? Whhelll my installation of Autodesk Inventor can build a case for one SBC in… all of six weeks!!! Take that!

The devices usually get some descriptor of what they look like…

For example I have:

• Flatboard - an old core2duo era Xeon bare tower server board I got on Craigslist for $20 that lives on a custom backplate and no case (thus, is flat)
• OrangeBox - an Orange Pi 5 in a aptly-colored orange case I custom modeled and 3d printed for it
• DumbBrick - my retired gaming PC built from a t30 dell tower server that is basically a nondescript black brick

BOINC! Do some science. :)

The preloaded spyware OS is half baked, horribly unfinished, and also locked to the hardware. You can work around it to install your own OS but they provide zero support and explicitly say it is not supposed to be allowed by ToS while intentionally making it as hard as possible by making the BIOS inaccessible and digitally signed to their own OS. Fuck that.

The crowdfunding fundraiser (where there are zero penalties if things are shipped broken, incomplete or not at all) is super fishy and the non-discount price is astronomical. While the hardware looks nice… Hard, hard pass right now, stinks of vendor lockin and illegal data vacuuming. Do not buy.

Source video: https://youtu.be/Y_MgY7wgII8

NAT to extremes… it’s Starlink so I think I’m almost completely obfuscated from the internet entirely.

quite frankly i don’t really host anything that needs to be accessible from the general Internet so I never bothered with workarounds.

100% is lan only cause my isp is a cunt

i got the random Dell SFF optiplex with 16gb of upgraded ram and a i5-4690 sitting at the girlfriend’s house because she’s the only one with an ISP that still allows public ip’s.
It runs Minecraft.

at home i have my old 9yo retired gaming desktop doing seedbox work and mostly just running BOINC to donate compute power to science… and also keep my feet warm lol

yeah. that’s it. i really don’t do shit even though i totally could.

me after 15 years of intermittent learning self hosting:

i have the one random office PC that runs minecraft

…yeah that’s it

Generally speaking, any device (“server”) hosting a “service” NEEDS to be assigned a static IP. It simplifies routing significantly and avoids random break problems because DHCP is incredibly stupid at times…

Is there any specific reason you need DHCP to assign an IP to your main hosting server vs setting it all statically?

Moving it to it’s own system will not fix the routing problem. You can probably still leave it on the USG.

You should be able to set a fixed static IP on your server, and then also statically assign that same IP to your server in your USG DHCP config- as long as they both are “thinking about” the same IP I think routing should work correctly.

If that breaks, try just assigning the static IP only from the USG side or only from the server’s side. I’m 90% sure that even if the USG does not have your server machine in it’s client list, if it sends broadcast packets to an entered IP looking for the unifi server, and the unifi server is listening on that manually set IP, they should be able to talk.

disclaimer: i am high as shit right now and this may be bullshit