Beyond the parts bin

In most post-apocalyptic movies I know, people eventually start piecing together the pre-apocalyptic remnants of a supposedly better but bygone era into something new. Often just to survive in that world. Mad Max comes to mind. Rarely to accidentally create a better world while trying to get to a tropical island, as in the case of Zefram Cochrane’s Phoenix¹.

Somehow I’ve been getting a similar feeling lately when it comes to piecing together new tech for my home office. I live in a time when the promise of ever more performance for ever less money no longer holds. Price-wise, it has been replaced by the “Age of the WTF!?!?”. As a private individual, you’re effectively buying on the spot market, and right now that market seems to know only one direction … up.

I suspect that scalping graphics cards would currently make me more profit than my ETFs. I’m glad that, thanks to being a Mac user, I can at least keep myself somewhat out of the desktop component-buying business — even if I’m used to a certain amount of pricing grief over there too.

I’ve always had a tendency to look at the latest stuff — within healthy limits — and then buy. Increasingly, though, I’m steering my investments toward squeezing as much further use as possible out of what I already own.

I noticed this a few days ago: I realized that for certain tests, 64 GB in a mini PC would be rather nice. I needed more VMs. Many more VMs. Many, many more VMs.

I use a Minisforum UM890Pro as my virtualization environment running Proxmox. I’ve had it for a while. The mini PC used to have 64 GB. That’s how I bought it. But at some point I had taken one of its 32 GB sticks to give a Ugreen NAS more than the 8 GB it shipped with. I wanted to get the NAS up and running quickly. Both the NAS and the mini PC used the same DIMMs. DDR5 SODIMM. Great! Screwdriver. DIMM transplant.

I didn’t really need the 64 GB in the mini PC back then. I thought: “Ah, you’ll buy those 32 GB back someday.” Sure, it may well have made the mini PC a bit slower. But I didn’t need those last few percent of performance either. Someday turned into never, because I didn’t miss the absent 32 gigabytes. And who knows, maybe the 48 GB DIMMs would have gotten cheap. 96 GB did have a certain appeal.

Good plan? Yeah, maybe. Back then. The forces of the market, at any rate, laughed at that plan.

Fast forward. It’s June 2026. One Sunday, never turned into the necessity of “now”. I needed that memory. Taking the stick away from the NAS was not an option. The NAS needed the RAM just as much. Maybe not 32 GB, but definitely more than the 8 GB it shipped with, and more than 16 GB too. Keep yanking the DIMM out of the NAS and putting it into the mini PC for tests, over and over? A surefire recipe for angering the lords of electrostatics sooner or later and ending up with no memory at all.

So I thought: Okay … I’ll just buy new ones, and mentally braced myself for a punch in the face. I had a rough idea of what was coming. I go to the website of a hardware peddler near my old hometown (old loyalties) and read something starting north of 340 euros, next vendor 399 €, yet another vendor 359.00 €. Yeah … no.

Okay … what do I still have lying around? Mad Max — Beyond the Parts Bin. These days you hardly dare throw anything away anymore.

A bad purchase was to be the solution: my HP EliteDesk 800 G5, bought last year as a refurbished … refurbishished … refurbi-whatever … uh, second-hand machine, has 32 GB — although, first, it’s DDR4 and, second, it’s in the form of two sticks. What I had planned for that system when I ordered it sadly didn’t pan out. So it eked out its existence on my desk as an occasional Docker test environment. More of a keeping-it-busy-gazing-out-the-window arrangement than actual use.

But there they were: 32 gigabytes. But of course they fit neither the mini PC nor the existing NAS. If only because they were two modules.

So really, new RAM had to be bought. Still, I couldn’t quite bring myself to plunk down that much money for 32 GB of notebook memory. Just in terms of raw material value. Such a dinky little circuit board for that many euros.

Around that time I stumbled across the successor to my NAS system. Up to then I had a UGREEN NASync DXP2800. UGREEN recently reworked it, released it in a beefier version, and gave it the suffix GT.²

Interestingly, this system takes one decisive step backwards: it takes DDR4. DDR4? Eureka! Or its household version: the flickering lightbulb over my head.

Since the GT was newly on offer, I bought it for 399 € — roughly the price I’d seen brand-name DIMMs going for at my trusted hardware peddlers. Okay, so no money saved for now, but in exchange: 10 GBit and a faster CPU. And considerably more hardware in hand than that dinky little board.³ You can still get barebones systems at a pretty decent price. But add the components you need to put the machine into service in a manner befitting its station, and it gets expensive fast.

So what did I do? A swap circle doubling as an excuse to buy new hardware for a last time! Bought myself a new NAS so I could use the HP’s memory in the NAS. Which got me my 32 GB DDR5 SODIMM back so I could stick it into the mini PC again. Tilt.

The EliteDesk, of course, no longer works. Its memory has been taken from it, and it now waits to be laid into the parts bin. Or to be revived with finds from that very bin.

The whole thing feels a bit like a scene from an entirely different movie: “The Brave Little Toaster to the Rescue”, when the little radio hands over its WFC-11-12-55 to the supercomputer “Wittgenstein”, sacrificing itself to save some dogs. Sniff. I’m currently searching for the 8 GB module that turned out to have gone missing within no time after the rebuild. Or maybe I’ll still get 32 gigabytes of DDR4 from Nome.⁴

The old NAS has since found a new home⁵. Though, as I said, I seriously wonder whether it’s a good idea to give away any hardware at all right now. At least it made the whole swap somewhat more economically sensible.

End of story? Nope. Why did I need the extra 32 gigabytes? All those VMs … some of them have become genuinely important for what I do throughout the day. It’s not just my homelab anymore. A mirrored disk would be quite appropriate at this point. And with that, the drama moved into its second stage.

Back in the day I had treated myself to a pretty good SSD for the EliteDesk. 512 GB. For a good 50 €. After the RAM uppercut came the SSD jab. The manufacturer of my SSD doesn’t even sell it as a 512 GB version anymore. Buying two 1 TB SSDs new wasn’t beyond my financial means — they haven’t gotten that expensive — but very clearly beyond my financial willingness. Even a nerd has pain thresholds somewhere.

I bought a cheap SSD, so now there’s a bargain-bin SSD sitting next to the very high-quality one. So far they’re getting along. Maybe there’s no class warfare between the two because the cheap SSD today simply costs twice what the high-quality one did back then. “You may be twice as good, but I’m twice as expensive.” But this configuration is nothing to write home about, and certainly nothing to sensibly build a RAID 1 on. The characteristics in endurance and performance are just too different. So what am I doing instead? An hourly backup of the VMs to the cheap SSD and a daily one to the NAS. Instead of RAID: perpetual backup. Everything seems to be working now.

My two 4 TB SSDs in the NAS now cost well over 1200 euros. I am fervently hoping none of them dies.

So now I have a thoroughly weird storage configuration in my virtualization server and a colorful mix of old and new components in the NAS. I think I’m going to rename my mini PC Rockatansky.

Zefram got the Vulcans’ attention with his hand-hammered rocket, and in Mad Max people did get from A to B as well — even if neither A nor B was a particularly desirable place to be. And if I’m honest: at home I don’t need more performance than the hardware I’ve had for a while now already gives me. If anything really pushes my systems to their limits, it’s browsers running amok. And with that, for the first time in many years, I’m checking out of the replacement-purchase cycle I’ve been spinning along in since a Quantum Bigfoot back in 1995.

PS: How I’m supposed to explain all this to the tax office? No idea.