Nathan Reynolds

I burned through three cheap microSD cards before I figured this out. Each one died within six months of running my Home Assistant setup, and two of them corrupted my SD card so badly that I had to reflash from scratch. That is why I built this guide. If you need a high endurance microSD … Read more

I lost a crucial dash cam clip two years ago because the card inside my camera gave up without warning. That single failure pushed me into testing high endurance microSD cards full-time, and after running four flagship models across VIOFO, BlackVue, and a Reolink security camera for the past six months, I have a clear … Read more

Last summer, I watched a neighbor’s footage of a package theft turn into a corrupted, unwatchable mess because their cheap consumer microSD card died mid-write. That scene is exactly why I started testing endurance-rated microSD cards in my own home security setup. After 90 days of running 8 cards across three 24/7 cameras, I can … Read more

The best surveillance hard drive for a Frigate NVR is a surveillance-rated drive like the WD Purple 4TB or Seagate SkyHawk 4TB—both are engineered for 24/7 continuous recording, handle 180TB/year workloads, and support up to 64 cameras, making them ideal for most home and small-business Frigate installations. Running Frigate NVR puts unique demands on storage. … Read more

My Plex library had a problem: 11TB of movies and TV shows, a 4-bay NAS with every slot full, and a wishlist that kept growing. So over the past two years I have bought, tested, shucked, and swapped 10 different 16TB hard drives across my home server, a Synology running four drives, and a plain … Read more

I have been filling NAS boxes with pulled data center drives since 2018, and I have never once paid new-retail pricing for bulk storage. The math is hard to argue with: the best refurbished enterprise drives for a budget NAS cost a fraction of what new NAS-labeled drives run, and you get helium platters, 7200 … Read more

I have spent the last two years running Proxmox VE on N100 and Ryzen mini PCs, and the first lesson was brutal: the SSD you boot from matters more than the CPU you picked. Choosing the best SSD for booting Proxmox on a mini PC is not about sequential benchmarks, because a boot drive barely … Read more

The scariest part of running RAIDZ2 is not the drive failure itself. It is the resilver that follows, when every surviving drive gets read edge to edge under sustained load while ZFS rebuilds parity onto the replacement. Pick the wrong drive tier and that rebuild stretches from hours into days while your pool runs degraded. … Read more

Finding the best microSD card for Orange Pi 5 Plus builds is more important than most people realize, because this board reads its entire operating system from that little card on every single boot. The Orange Pi 5 Plus is an ARM-based single-board computer that boots Linux or Android from a microSD (TF) card, and … Read more

I ran the Beelink SER8 vs Minisforum MS-01 for virtualization side by side for three months, one as a quiet single Proxmox node under my desk and the other as the network core of a three-node cluster. Both are excellent home lab mini PCs, but they solve completely different problems. Picking the wrong one either … Read more