What about GiB?

Intel iGPU are very good for transcoding.

Other people have already talked about why you are having performance issues with the Pi. As for a better NAS solution you will probably be better off with a used desktop PC from the last 10 years. If the computer doesn’t have enough SATA ports you can get a sata addon card or HBA (host buss adapter) addon card flashed in IT mode. You should be able to find a lot of options on eBay. Maybe people can chime in with specific models to look at.

I have had good luck with self hosted Headscale server and Tailscale clients on Pfsense routers creating a mesh network. But I am trusting other people’s networks. So Tailscale clients on each computer and the NAS would be lower risk.

Tailscale. You can make a free account and they have clients for most things. If you want to self host, Headscale.

My setup is very influenced by consolidating multiple hosts to a single host. So far this setup has been extremely stable for me with the only quirk being the Truenas web gui initially loads very slowly if I haven’t accessed in a couple days. I assume it’s because all the memory for that has gone to swap to make space for caching.

Truenas has the primary focus of being a NAS. Running apps or VMs is more of a side thing. It can do these things fine, but because it’s not the primary focus it doesn’t get the same level of polish as the NAS aspects.

My personal solution is to run Proxmox as the host OS with a Truenas VM. Any other services I want to run get to live in VMs or LXC containers. For example all my docker services run across 3 VMs with a docker swarm setup.

Also it’s not as RAM limited because it uses system memory which can be upgraded.

I think there are 3D printing services that make to order.

I assume that is about hitting duplicate items. If there are 100 people selling the EXACT same dragon, hit them all and sort out the details later.

Any reason you need to encrypt the host OS information? I would assume anything interesting would be in the VM and you could probably have the VM encrypt it’s own storage.

To make sure there is not a misunderstanding, the wattage of a PSU is not how much power it will draw. The wattage is how much is can supply. So if you have a 1000w PSU, but all your components draw 200w of power it will use about 200w of power.

Additionally, if you plan to get a lot of HDDs in the future, do some research on power rails. Some PSUs are designed to only be able to supply a small amount of power to things like HDDs because most people only have 1 or 2.

I have used audiobook shelf to read a couple of PDF files. Seemed to work fine. I mostly use it for audio books.

I’ve seen some videos talking about iron based battery tech. My understanding is that is doesn’t wear out nearly as fast as lithium based tech and less of a fire risk. Downside is that it is less energy dense, so doesn’t work for mobile applications. But that shouldn’t be a problem for stationary applications, like the power grid.

Mostly, but not entirely.

Also as you get older and your nervous system degrades things are perceived as being bland. So add spicy because people will frequently choose pain over boredom.

If you have mechanical HDD you may want to get a foam lined case and anti static bags. That should be the best approach to avoid drive damage.

As for leaving things in the rack, I am concerned that road vibration could walk screws out. That would be bad.

In a practical sense, making lead hot won’t break it down. But I wonder if there is any temperature where lead would stop being lead and continue to not be lead after the results cool down again?

I understand that your concerned for the person, but simply telling them that they need to produce proof before you can go any further seems fine.

Basically it is the trendy word to say, “This thing does not align to my narrow world view and is therefore bad and wrong.”