Be also very careful about another drive type I became aware of a year or so ago when researching for a new lappy.... There's machines that are put out with something called eMMC (Embedded Multi-Media Card) which can bring speeds down to about IDE speeds on a good day, soldered onto the main board. So if that drive dies, you're machine is toast short of going with an external storage solution via USB or something like that. These drives are basically like your standard SD or CF cards you'll find in cameras. But... Some SD cards are faster than the eMMC drives.

...the hypervisor... dhcp... dns.... and I'll regret the minute that I have to do that all over.

I wasn't aware of STP. But I've had devices that somehow perform broadcast storms and have taken down a segment of my network. It's probably because the "dumb" TP-Link GigE switches I have don't know about this protocol, or what, because where I plug into my Dell switch, I don't "feel" that problem. From my Dell Switch, I have two distinct physical routes out to feed the house (Technically a couple more as I started to introduce segmentation for wireless versus wired, but didn't get that far when I realized my switches and APs didn't handle vLans all that well). I have one idiotically long wire going from the Dell switch to a Dumb TPLink switch (Goes along the outside wall... Probably 25-50 feet or so?), from there I distribute to my TV, my wifes computers, camera system, etc. I then run another wire from there upstairs which is fed into another switch that lives in my bedroom. That switch feeds two other switches on the same floor. One wire goes to a switch I have on my night stand which feeds my side of the bed a GigE cable, feeds my wireless access point that sits on my stand as well, and feeds my wife another GigE cable for her PCs when she wants to download games on Wired instead of Wireless while in bed. From that "entrance to the bedroom switch", I then go feed another switch which feeds me kids their computers and devices they each have in their room, and whatever they plug into it. Down in the basement, where I "live", from the Dell switch I feed a switch that sits on my desk, and it goes and feeds my computer, my "toys" like my MiSTer, my C64 U2+, a cable to feed a P3 to play older games under Win98/XP/whatever, and a few extra cables hanging around for when I put up my retro machines (Plural--whole lotta plural on that) on the desk to work on. So, my network literally looks like a cobweb. Why I mention all that is I've had from the livingroom floor and UP go "down". My basement computers, including my server, don't feel a thing. That's when I know that I have a computer that's in hibernate mode, the NIC is still active, but it goes stupid for whatever reason and introduces a storm. So my Dell switch knows how to block that port so I can carry on, but the rest of the house? Glad I don't have a ticketing system for homelab stuff. ... ahem... they'd not be able to make a ticket...

@Brandon Lee The other thing too is entirely dependent on who you go to for big-company models. I have little faith with Gemini anymore, yet I'm stuck with it for work. I have to go to OpenAI to say in super general terms "I'm trying to do this, Gemini is giving me this trash, whats the right answer or what is it overlooking" and then I'm usually OK. For home use, I'm 100% OpenAI, rarely go to Claude anymore even though I'm paying for it. (I figure having two AIs in case one goes down is basically an escape hatch for when I need it and can muddle through whatever it is I'm doing using my own brain) I guess that's the problem though. Companies that deal directly with AI models (OpenAI, maybe Claude?) are going to be far superior than the companies that are catching up, like Google, and MSoft.

{shakes head} So, ChatGPT earlier today was stupidly slow, so I went to my home LLM and started to use DeepSeek. Within 5 prompts, the machine went nuts and started talking about math, sciences, interpretive dance, and a whole lot of other things that I had to kill after 10 minutes of waiting on an answer for "Ok, so given your example of pkill, how can I change your example to let me kill a process that has the word 'this' in the path, but not kill services like mysql?" and it went on and on and on.... No idea what happened, but I have to get Semaphore to go punch updates to OpenUI and all the LLMs on my AI machine me thinks. Regularly.