Almost 12 years ago, when I got my first real computer, immediately broke it, and had to learn to fix it on my own- I never expected to grow to this point.
Over the next summer, I decided that maybe there was more to computers than browsing the internet and playing flash games. Taking them apart, stripping the components out, and building an entirely new “Frankenstein machine” turned out to be a whole lot more fun than I bargained for. Home-labbing, my longest running, and by far costliest hobby so far, all started out with a single core AMD Athlon powered desktop that my dad “forgot” to return to my school. Once I realized that no matter how many scavenged parts I could throw in that thing, I did the only sensible thing- beg my dad for a newer, shinier, more powerful system.
Begging didn’t work out too well for me, so I had to save up for it on my own. My first foray into “performance” computing led me to buy an Amazon Special Gaming PC for the meager sum of $599 at the time. The (at the time) already aging AMD FX-4300 CPU, 16GBs of RAM, and Radeon R7 360 GPU combined with a cheap 1TB Hard Drive blew me away. I never knew computers could be so fast, and could do so much. The games I had played on my Xbox looked like crude sketches in comparison to what my “beastly” gaming rig could produce. Reality set in not long after, of course, as it always does. That PC sucked, and boy did I start to notice it quickly. Through the guidance of the YouTube university and Linus Tech Tips, I tried everything to make that system give me even 60 frames per second in World of Tanks and War Thunder- but it simply could not deliver. So, I went out and spent some more big-boy bucks and purchased some well deserved upgrades: a Ryzen 5 1600, 8GBs of DDR4 RAM, a 240GB SSD, and the star of the show- a Radeon RX580.
For a few years after that, it served me well. Through Grand Theft Auto 5 and Borderlands 2, Nier Automata, and of course War Thunder, I was grinning from ear to ear. Around that time, I also realized that, as a broke teenager in High School, I really didn’t want to pay for cloud storage, nor did I want to pay to watch movies and shows that I totally “legitimately obtained”. I made the jump to archiving media on my own, and decided to get into the Home lab aspect of things that the people of the interwebs spoke so highly of. The start of that journey has propelled me to learn the things I know today, and helped develop my passion for computers, computer networks, and media archival.
In this blog post, I’ll tell you more about my true “home lab’s” humble beginnings.