since you’re buying parts, you can specifically look for boards with 6-8 (more than that will require a ‘specialty’ board). 8 isn’t impossible to find. start a build on pcpartpicker, go straight to motherboards and filter 8 or more ‘SATA 6Gb/s Ports’, then sort low-to-high on price. you should find a msi pro am4 and an asus prime am5 that are quite reasonably priced and have multiple reputable vendors selling them.

otherwise you’re looking for an expansion card to add to a board you’ve already got or to expand one of those above for even more.

of course, you need the drive bays to hold them all, too. which can be harder to find at a reasonable and affordable price than motherboards and controller cards.

and even when you do know what you’re doing, you’re probably choosing not to host your own. at least not one that faces the public. a private mail ‘server’ that consolidates mail for you from multiple providers (and sends mail back out the same way) is different.

i have an old wood desk at the office. it just resonates and amplifies noise when i set a desktop form factor external hdd (with its attached rubber feet) on it. it now sits on a couple old-school foam rubber mouse mats.

don’t expect a 19 year old laptop to perform all the tricks something more ‘modern’ can do, such as transcoding video for a streaming media server. also note that a t5600 is not a ulv chip (draws as much as 34w under load, on its own)–so probably not a candidate to run ‘lid down’ without some outside help for cooling.

it’s not fast, it’s not power efficient, it has slow networking (10/100 and 22-year old ‘g’ wifi), and lacks usb3 for ‘tolerable’ speed on extra external storage space—but it will be ‘ok enough’ for learning on.

if you go with something like yunohost or even dietpi, you will pretty much restrict yourself to what it can run and do and how it does it. if you want more ‘control’ or to install things they don’t offer themselves, you’ll need to ‘roll your own’. a base (console only) debian would be a great place to start. popular, stable, and tons of online resources and tutorials.

i use dietpi, which is built upon a minimal debian.

“mid evil” is just a minor villain in a movie.

i can’t. unless i’m really, really tired. i prefer blankets… as in plural… with some bulk and weight to them.

$65 for 4tb? they’re almost certainly fake crap. just got done giving someone the bad news on some similarly-priced sd and ssd they bought off ebay.

https://www.grc.com/validrive.htm will verify real capacity in seconds.

captive portal detection, certificate status verification, and iirc server settings updates. yes. none of them are ‘absolutely required’ but they do exist to improve the reliability and secure operation of the program–and none are secret nasty spying telemetry. just turn those particular settings off as desired.

that’s the c2r maintenance process. main job is to set up and update the local files for office.

that bit you can turn off in edge settings… but the webview engine stays because of widgets and probably some other bullshit.

and to install ‘mandatory’ giant bloated updates faster…

and to reboot faster after crashes (which may or may not have been caused by the above updates)…

when i set up a new pc i warn the users moving from really old ones that their coffee-fetching and bagel toasting time is about to shrink to zero.

it’s been a long time but i vaguely remember an office tray icon or desktop toolbar or something that could run all the time.

nowadays, windows caching and prefetch should be more than enough… and that’s not even considering the fast ssd we have now, either.

libreoffice. which has also had a similar feature for years.

i had a monitor like that once. big bright af blue power light baked into the power button, bottom center of the bezel. blue led was the ‘new’ thing back then. the barton-era matching pc (which i didn’t have) had a larger matching button on its front. if you know your '00s pavilions, you know the ones.

it was horrible. that monitor lived its entire life with a black piece of paper taped over the whole switch and light. i was not saddened when it finally gave up and failed to turn on. i was more annoyed that it took 15 years for it to fail.

my mom had that hair for a bit when i was little. used to have real long hair, then she (i think gramma did the deed) cut it off to this… stayed like that til she went full dorothy hamill in '76 like so many others back then.

i think it comes with the territory; the kinds of users that lemmy attracts–and doesn’t.

democrats are simply the ‘lesser evil’, and have been since the 1960s, at least… and we’ve needed a viable third party left of the mainstream for longer.

republican administrations drag us down and undo gains made. democrats repair some of the damage–but never quite enough, never push progress enough. they lose. it gets undone again and the cycle repeats.

but now it’s all getting destroyed. there may not be a continuation of the cycle. it’s hell from here on until ‘trumpism’ and maga are what is completely destroyed.

i find ddg sufficient for nearly everything. occasionally i will go to startpage or ecosia or mojeek for a different ‘perspective’, but that is not very often at all. i also use wolframalpha almost daily for some sort of calculation or conversion.

i haven’t used google or bing except by accident when using someone else’s browser or device (that is, when i forget to go to duck.com first).