LSI cards are generally easy to switch to IT mode. You should be able to find a guide on servethehome.com for your model.

This, but if you already have a SAS card in RAID mode you might be able to flash IT (AKA HBA) mode firmware instead of buying a new card.

Also, SAS cables fit SATA drives, but not vice versa. So no need to buy new cables.

Yeah, the form factor, HDMI-CEC support, and integration with other valve hardware are what really sell it. But it’s not going to be underpriced for the specs, like consoles tend to be.

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RAM costs will likely affect both custom built machines and the steam machine equally.

Valve already announced it will be priced similarly to a PC you build yourself.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/11/valves-steam-machine-looks-like-a-console-but-dont-expect-it-to-be-priced-like-one/

I’m disappointed by the lack of Whose Line Is It Anyway references in this thread :(

“everything’s made up and the points don’t matter”

Product owner is responsible for making sure the product meets customer needs. Project manager is responsible for making sure the project is completed on time and meets the requirements that are defined by the PO.

Not if it’s for oil based paints.

Did you know you can be exposed to other cultures without leaving the country? You did a good job of pointing out why travel alone doesn’t make people more open minded, but you didn’t touch on the opportunities Americans have to connect with other cultures without leaving their own country.

Yes.

You aren’t going to find that in every industry/career. Not sure what other advice I can give, but if I was in that situation I’d be looking for a career/field that uses a similar set of skills but has a better culture.

Besides RAM, what resources do you think you’re saving? Not CPU cycles or IO ops, because you’re processing the same amount of DB queries either way. Not power consumption, since that isn’t affected by RAM utilization. Maybe disc space? But that’s even cheaper than RAM.

Or more importantly: the extent to which you can self-host out of sheer luck and ignorance like you suggest is very limited. If you don’t want to engage with a minimum amount of configuration, you might bump into security issues (a much broader and complex subject) long before any of the above has a material impact.

You’re mischaracterizing what I said. My point is that running multiple DB processes on a server isn’t going to have a significant impact on system load, if all other factor are kept constant.

You seem to be obsessed with optimising one resource at the expense of others. Time is a limited resource, and even if it only takes 5 minutes to configure all of your containers to share a single db backend (it will take longer than that even if you just have 2), you’re only going to save a few MB of RAM. And since RAM costs roughly $2.5/GB (0.25 cents/MB) your time would have to be worth very little for this to be worthwhile.

On the other hand, if you’re doing it to learn more about computers then it might be worthwhile. This is a community of hobbiests, after all…

Neither, I’m trying to explain that you don’t need to know the implementation details of the software running on your server to backup the entire thing.

Where are you getting that from? The fastest and easiest way to back up any server is a full filesystem backup, especially if you’re using something like zfs or btrfs.

I’m saying this based on real world experience: after a certain point you start to see deminishing returns when optimizing a system, and you’re better off focusing your efforts elsewhere. For most applications, customizing containerized services to share databases is far past that point.

Do you have the data to back that up? Have you measured how much of an impact on system load and power consumption having 2 separate DB processes has?

Roughly the same amount of work is being done by the CPU if you split your DBs between 2 servers or just use one. There might be a slight increase in memory usage, but that would only matter in a few niche applications and wouldn’t affect environmental impact.

For most applications the overhead of running a second DB server is negligible.

I write software for a living, and have worked with all 3 database options in the past. I don’t know what DB backend my nextcloud server is using, nor do I care.