I’m sure a lot of people’s self hosting journey started on junk hardware… “try it out”, followed by “oh this is cool” followed by “omg I could do this, that and that” followed by dumping that hand-me-down garbage hardware you were using for something new and shiny specifically for the server.

My unRAID journey was this exactly. I now have a 12 hot/swap bay rack mounted case, with a Ryzan 9 multi core, ECC ram, but it started out with my ‘old’ PC with a few old/small HDDs

That might be it, but would an optical drive run off that? Guess it’s all the same power wires.

I’ve asked my dad to snap a picture if he doesn’t mind :) but it’s a bit of a pain to get to

I didn’t have anything at the house to split off the sata power and I was ok getting rid of my spare stuff so it worked out better anyway

no, this thing had a separate power/data. It was a normal sized optical drive (old thick size). I’m going to see if I can get my dad to snap a picture. They’re 600 miles away so I can’t just do it real quick.

Like a tiny proprietary connector, not Molex, not SATA. So the power supply had a single line running to the spinner HDD (standard SATA), and then piggy backed off that to the optical drive was this little connector. Kind of looked like a 4pin fan connector size. I didn’t bother investigating after my plan to just disconnect the optical drive was thwarted <sigh>

Part of my Christmas gift to my father this year was getting him a SSD, and install Linux on his PC, that doesn’t support Windows 11. But his Dell was very not friendly for upgrading. It has a proprietary PSU with only the connectors needed to run the one HDD and Optical drive (also a non sata connector).

I had a plan in case there were issues, and had enough spare parts to build him a nicer used PC. It’s also an upgrade for him as his Dell was a 6th gen i5, now he’s got a 7th gen i7 :) and more ram.

But I built it, and installed Fedora 41 KDE on it. He started setting it up here over the holidays then took it home and set it up there. He’s not run into any “problems” he hasn’t found solutions for. Mom is still using the Dell but Dad hopes he can eventually get her moved to the Linux box.

I used to run ESET and really liked them ‘back in the day’ and glad to see them looking out for people.