Tag: hardware

Master UPS sizing math: VA vs watts, runtime calculations, battery replacement costs, NUT monitoring, and when EcoFlow beats enterprise hardware.

Raspberry Pi 5 vs Mini PC: when ARM wins, real costs with NVMe HATs, power consumption, performance, and ecosystem trade-offs for your home lab.

Head-to-head benchmarks: Intel N100/N305 vs Ryzen 7000 mini PCs. Power consumption, NVMe slots, RAM, transcoding, virtualization. Which one to buy.

Dell R630/R730 and SuperMicro buying guide for 2026. Real idle power draw, how loud they get, what to avoid entirely, and how to read an eBay listing.

NUT (Network UPS Tools) monitors APC, CyberPower, and Eaton UPSes and triggers graceful shutdowns before your home lab eats a corrupt ZFS pool.

Which LoRa boards to buy for Meshtastic or MeshCore, why the antenna and mounting height matter more than the radio, and what to skip on your first order.

Hardware RAID controllers used to be necessary. Now they're often a liability. Here's when to flash that LSI card to IT mode, when to keep it, and why ZFS specifically refuses to share.

Cut rack cable clutter with Power over Ethernet. A no-nonsense guide to PoE standards, switch power budgets, and cleanly powering your home lab gear rack.

USB-C Power Delivery can cleanly power your entire mini-PC homelab. Here is what PD versions, cable wattage ratings, and UPS compatibility actually matter.

Used 10GbE NICs for your homelab in 2026: which Mellanox, Intel, or Chelsio card to buy, which ones to skip entirely, and exactly why the X540 runs hot.

Stop living with spaghetti rack cables. A practical guide to DIY patch panels, structured rack cabling, and a cable layout that will not haunt you at 2 AM.

SFP+ optics, DACs, AOCs, and fiber for home lab 10G networking, what to buy, what to avoid, and how to stop vendor lock-in from wrecking your wallet.