The first website with data going that far back I found is pcindex.app. to be fair, I’ve never heard of it, but their data for 1TB HDDs follows what I emotionally remember; prices skyrocketed in 2011 after the floods, then stayed higher forever after. They started getting more reasonable in 2019, but the AI boom have since sent things off again.

I just ran an import of only a dozen photos and it did go up to 2.3GB usage. I knew containers were more lightweight but I didn’t think a VM could get that bad. Hopefully it’s reporting a sum of virtual or assigned memory space and isn’t actually hogging that much in physical ram.

7GB for immich is wild, my instance with 2TB of photos is currently using 811MB of RAM. What’s eating it all?

I personally prefer smaller setups, but SilverStone make very high quality though expensive cases that bridge the gap between server/workstation. Have a look at their CS383 or SETA H2

Also jonsbo have the N5

Depending on how the cables have been put in, it can be fairly easy to replace an existing run by tying the new cable to the old one and pulling it through.

I’d be worried about lateral movement. Something like a XSS in jellyfin that gets them to my browser on my main computer, or otherwise leveraging the network proximity in anyway to spread to other machines with stuff I care about.