You can do both. Sell a license and sell cloud storage.

The price depends on the market. Some people won’t pay out of principle, and some might even think it’s too cheap if you provide enough value.

The only way to truly know is to actually build it and sell it.

Best of luck!

Is there a typo on the HDD prices? Looks super expensive. With that amount you could have 48TB of NVME drives (assuming you have a controller for that many sticks, but you probably could buy one with the leftover from the sticks)

In general you shouldn't spend more on newer/larger capacity HDDs unless you absolutely need that much storage per slot (that is, you are space constrained), as the prices invariably go down in less than an year. Smaller drives with 12~16TB are a much better TB/$. Check diskprices.com to see current trends.

If you care about speed, relying on HDDs for that is a bad proposition. You are better served by a SSD cache in front of the HDDs. In case of SSD failure, it's much cheaper/faster to replace that SSD than to rebuild your strained RAID.

As for CPU performance, pretty much any newer Intel QuickSync will handle your needs. If money isn't an issue, I'd rather go with Intel NUC 12th gen or newer. I have one and it handles anything I throw at it, including the most demanding 4k transcoding. The NUC and a 4-disk Synology uses less than 50w with the disks being used.

Fastmail and nextdns. I'm still paying for iCloud, but I intend to move everything to my local server.

I go on and off streaming services: Disney, Hulu, Netflix, HBO.

Amazon Prime, which includes a bunch of goodies.

Kindle Unlimited. I usually wait for promotions since there isn't a ton of material I like that I haven't read yet. Also I'm rather busy lately.

There’s nothing really private about your ip. Whatever you need to do to secure your network you have to do in any solution for this problem.

Can't you setup a new array with your new 3 drives, copy the data over, then expand your array with your old drives? IIRC zfs added support for expanding pools last year or so?

If you want to use a cloud provider, then your main problem will be uploading this much data and then downloading it back again, both price and time wise.

An easier solution is in fact copying the data over to another storage. Maybe borrow some pendrives from friends/family?

You can buy a PCIe riser for your NIC. This could be a solution for the GPU taking a lot of space. Naturally you still need a slot on the case to attach the NIC to, but at least you will be able to put it into a PCIe slot.

It's fine to have high CPU usage when something is actually running. I meant that it's not normal to have background tasks (open programs that aren't actively being used) consistently consuming too much CPU. 0~5% would be healthy. Maybe even 10%. Most definitely not 75%+.

Wouldn’t we all be very pleased with 5k daily users? Lol

You will be fine. Any VPS/cloud will work for the database don’t forget your backups. In fact, this is where you should invest a bit more and have a managed database solution, so you can scale up if needed, unless you are very savvy with db administration

Airtable, notion, or any of the open source clones. Personally I don’t like any of the popular clones, but I’m picky.

I have vscode but on my os and then connect via the remote extension. Works well.

For docker, I’d rather go with VM if you want isolation from one project to another. They are easier to snapshot and easier to reason around for development in my opinion

If you don’t feel slowed down, I wouldn’t change a thing honestly. At most consider cabling your media devices instead of streaming over Wi-Fi.

2.5g works on cat5e for reasonable distance. I’d be surprised if anybody today would have something slower.