I have hardware laying around i decide to put to use. In the 3rd world a chatgpt subscription is the equivalent of $100 a month for very little benefit. Instead of queueing and using other people’s free resources better to use my own. There are also other reasons like backup strategy using cloud, NAS and archives which require your own hardware. A 1U chassis can fit a chinese recycled board with decent specs, a gpu and 4 hot swap drives cheap. Does decently if you pair with good network hardware so you only wake it up when needed. I use mikrotik for networking. Ive come to a point where my skills are good and paying for the cloud is a big waste.

My raid 5 hdds bench at 1GB/s but 1.25GB/s sustained wouldnt be easy. Still even 5x more speeds than gigabit is good but not when the orange pi 5 boasts 2x 2.5Gb/s NICs suddenly your hardware feels old. I have a sfp+ switch and a gigabit switch with sfp+ but none of the newer stuff. Sfp+ is cheaper than 10Gb ethernet as the switches cost a lot if you need 24 ports.

My raid 5 hdds bench at 1GB/s but 1.25GB/s sustained wouldnt be easy. Still even 5x more speeds than gigabit is good but not when the orange pi 5 boasts 2x 2.5Gb/s NICs suddenly your hardware feels old. I have a sfp+ switch and a gigabit switch with sfp+ but none of the newer stuff. Sfp+ is cheaper than 10Gb ethernet as the switches cost a lot if you need 24 ports.