Barbecue Cowboy

But, all these people in power keep telling us that violence is never the answer. They would never lie to us.

That’s what you’re going to get!

I mean fuck, better than what they’ve been doing.

You can get x variants for under 100 too but you got to be more patient. Larger resellers don’t always understand the difference in models. Man, to be honest, I don’t either. You don’t have to go this in depth but look at the rear view for addons on the eBay listing. I usually don’t worry about buying ones with warranty/etc and I’ve only been burned once (probably water damage).

In my experience, if you’re wanting to use a USB Ethernet 2.5g or more, you may want to come up with at least a USB c port. I get that it should work with USB 3 but the speeds in practice just never worked out for me. I could have been facing those reliability issues you mentioned. Experiments in that area may eventually lead you back to scavenging for models that accommodate a riser card for 10g which is a very well weathered path. If you want Ceph, it’s not absolutely required but you’re probably going to end up there. I wouldn’t do Ceph again.

Somewhat similar on the CPU, I only discovered problems when I started experimenting with mass video re-encoding which is probably similar to the workload on Frigate. With the top on, I can only really use about half the cpus consistently without facing slowdowns due to heat. CPU upgrades are also mostly out.

Minor segue: If you haven’t checked out the servethehome forums, highly recommended. It’s probably the best source of knowledge on these.

So, there’s also a 4 port Ethernet card fitted specifically for the m series tiny lines that you used to be able to get from Lenovo with a riser (your specific model may not have a riser). You can still get it on eBay, but AliExpress is probably your spot if you’re not a big spender.

Some specific revisions in the tiny lines won’t even have the spot where you’d plug a riser card into populated, I think the 910q may be one of the ones where it’s missing. The qs sometimes indicate the lowest spec but not always. The m910x will definitely have it and most specialty models in the m9xx(x) range will also have a riser slot. The cards come with a specially fitted bracket you can use though that will fit pretty seamlessly. The bracket is purchaseable separately pretty often and is repurposable with a bit of planning.

My purchases of used Lenovo hardware became problematic long ago. If you can spend the extra money on the x variants, you’ll also usually get a better heat sink which might let you actually use all of your CPU without having to leave the top of the case off. The heatsink is real rough to buy separately.