

Please no. There’s so many alternatives out there that “just work” but aren’t locked down and indoctrinate you into a walled garden.
Qidi, Creality, Sovol, Prusa, etc.


Please no. There’s so many alternatives out there that “just work” but aren’t locked down and indoctrinate you into a walled garden.
Qidi, Creality, Sovol, Prusa, etc.


Well then very little of what I said actually applies!
Unless you know the hours on a drive, you might get brand new ones, or you might get ones with 50k hours on them. They may also be from the same batch, which isn’t ideal for data durability. If you’re ok with all that, then go for it. I generally don’t buy used drives because I don’t want to take the additional risk.
I’d be surprised if you can’t find a better deal on used spinning rust though… the shipping alone is probably half the value on a good chunk of sales from SmS.


I get that, that was also something I used to like about old servers, but let me float a few of the things that I’ve come to realize through my home-lab career to you:
One other thing that I’ll mention and you probably already know - enterprise servers are LOUD - even just a single one can literally sound like a jet engine. That’s not a hyperbolae. If this is your first one, don’t underestimate it. I had my servers in the basement with decent insulation, I used IPMI to throttle the fans back to 10%, and I could still hear the whine on my first floor when everything is quiet. If you end up having to turn down the fans due to noise, you’re going to start having heat issues, and then you’re losing out on performance and shortening component lifespan. Noise-proofing a server is non-trivial - you have to allow air flow still, and where there’s air flow, there’s a path for noise too. My current setups all have 120mm and 140mm fans, and I can barely hear them when I’m working right next to them. My 3D printers are the loud ones in the basement now!


Yeah, they’re legit. Bought a few servers from them over the years. No major issues, packing was good, reasonable ship time.
Had one case where they sent a different NIC than what was listed. They just shipped me the correct one and told me not to bother sending the old one back.
Stopped buying from them though because I prefer off-the-shelf modern consumer hardware nowadays. The real cost is always power consumption, and I prefer to shell out more money up front in exchange for huge savings on power usage down the line. I can always run over to microcenter and replace a part same-day as opposed to ordering it online and hoping it comes soon.
If you’re a home-labber, I’d strongly suggest doing the same. Some of those old enterprise servers just gobble power for not that much compute relative to current day consumer machines.
If I was still buying older servers though, I’d probably be looking at their prices.
What are you considering buying?
They have their place. If you only do multicolor prints rarely, but change materials between prints a lot, that’s where they excel.
I have both an MMU (Prusa MK3S + MMU 2) and a toolchanger (very custom Voron 2.4 with Tapchanger), and the MMU gets used plenty to swap filament between prints. I look at my toolchanger as being for color prints, and I usually keep 6 colors of PETG on it. My MMU gets used more as the functional printer with all the engineering filaments on it like TPU, PC, ABS, PA. I rarely have to change filament rolls with this setup.
I am also looking at building one of these Swapper3Ds, which should prevent all the waste from printing multiple colors with the MMU.
Doesn’t seem very private to me😧
Spoiler: Roku doesn’t either. Immich + a RaspberryPi or other SBC is the way to go…


It’s just an OpenWebUI instance? What have you added to/changed about it?
Try brining the turkey overnight before roasting. Keeps the bird nice and moist in my experience.