I think you’ll find that everyone is qualified for prison quality healthcare already as long as they’re willing to commit a crime.

I’d be willing to risk it all for the pi.

Because they often have “bot” in their name to make it clear.

That may be true, but I have had nothing but reliability from mine. Hell, there was one with a broken plastic SATA pin support and bent pins, and that thing still worked and tested fine for 3 more years.

As with all things, results may vary, but if you have a decent backup of your most important files, they are still the best bang for your buck to get a huge amount of storage, imo.

Moving your files back and forth should be no problem, especially if you have a decent router. Local networks are freaky fast these days, and are often only limited by the read/write speed of your disk.

It’s so easy that you’ll never go back. There are options depending on what you want to do too. I primarily store entertainment media, so I ran a simple Ubuntu Server for years with cockpit installed so I could easily mount and manage drives and PLEX to serve the media. It got me hooked, and worked flawlessly.

I have since become more ambitious and run ProxMox with an Open Media Vault VM to serve the media through NFS to other VM’s. My experience with Open Media Vault has been that it is a bit more complicated than my previous setup, but has resulted in a lot more flexibility with how I can access the data from multiple computers.

I will warn you though that the collecting can get addicting. It’s always easy to justify adding just one more drive to the system, and they get cheaper and bigger every year.

Dude, all those cloud services are tough to get data out of. That’s why a lot of them charge an arm and a leg to have it mailed to you on physical media.

If those disks are the big plastic WD externals, they can be easily shucked and used in a NAS—much cheaper than buying the bare drives without the casing for reasons known only to WD. I have 80+ TB across 5 shucked drives, and the oldest has worked perfectly for over 6 years of heavy 24/7 use.

I get all that, and I wasn’t trying to suggest HDMI cords are useless. I just got the feeling that there was a cleaner way to accomplish what OP was trying to do since there were scant details about the end result in the post.

I ran a computer directly to the television for years before switching to PLEX and an Apple TV, hence the suggestion—the user experience increased so significantly that I would never go back.

What are you trying to display on the TV? I feel like most media can be handled better with something like PLEX rather than directly displaying it with an HDMI cord. Much easier to browse with a remote anyway.

The sanitation is part of the charm, IMO.

Making a lemmy post to ask an open ended opinion question and then getting hostile with people in the comments over their answers.

You seem to be lost, stranger. This is Lemmy—we’re decently civilized here. Your tone suggests you must be looking for Reddit.

It feels like you answered your own question—a second server comes with advantages and sounds like it isn’t a significant increase in price.

I guess that makes sense. It’s just interesting to see how people are so accustomed to interacting with private businesses that it is hard for them to imagine a system that operates in any other way.

Why does everyone keep coming up with ideas to centralize a decentralized system?

I believe they call that taxes.

I’m starting to feel like these ad posts are some big think tank trying to figure out how to monetize Lemmy.

No criticism taken! I had just seen a lot of posts talking about how things are broken today, so I figured I’d chime in to say it isn’t doom and gloom for all users. I have no doubt that these problems aren’t going to exist forever—all the devs and admins have already pulled off a miracle by keeping things running during this time of exponential growth.

This is the best equivalent on lemmy.world, but just in case you don’t know this about the Fediverse yet, you don’t need a community to be on your home instance to subscribe to it. If you find any community that you like on any other instance, you are able to subscribe by searching for that community from your home instance.

Just wanted to let you know that you aren’t limited to the communities you see on the lemmy.world community page, or ones linked in c/newcommunities.

I don’t want to jinx it, but other than a slight slowness in posting replies, I have had no issues loading lemmy.world on Memmy today. If I didn’t know any better, it would feel like any other day in the Fediverse.

So it sucks that there are issues to work out still, but it is also worth acknowledging that the hard work by the admins has kept the site running without major issue for a lot of users.