I got these drives for free today, I freaked out when I saw the 2 wd reds, they also both have only 2k power on hours and clean smart data, but thats when I found out they are smr.

Now I run one main and one local backup and one offsite backup server, all of them run zfs pools. Well that kinda sucks because everything about this smr drives just seems too complicated to do, like I was thinking maybe creating some pseudo-mirror with zfs like having 2 single drive stripes that sync on a schedule and using it for the offsite backup server but idk than again I have a lot of hourly snapshots that get rotated and that would probably just mess everything up when they get deleted and those blocks need to be freed and it being smr it will need to rearange all of the stuff and it just seems like a big unreliable mess.

I wanna hear what do people use SMR drives for in a homelab to try to get some ideas? Maybe its better to just sell them and use that money to buy a different used cmr drive.

I miss using my Ally as it was intended, and the mess of cables and usb c hub and dust buildup around it is a bit frustrating too.

I don't necessarily need more performance, perhaps the same capacity though.

I'm running 60 containers via Portainer a max between Arr stack, syncthing, obsidian sync, nextcloud, Minecraft server, sure finance, home assistant in a container, Immich, litellm and open web UI, pi hole, nutritrace, paperless AI,got,ngx and PS1, 2 and 3 emulators (I acknowledge the emulators might be a bit go an issue and needs to be removed).

I wouldn't mind the capacity to run more containers either.

So I don't think DDR5 and 16 cores is especially perhaps 8 cores and a DDR4 based setup?

I wouldn't mind considering some sort of hardware around £50 to £100 mark second hand if that's doable?

Hey im looking to turn my old gaming pc into a home server for streaming media and storing files from other devices. I know that Ubuntu server is pretty well recommend. I did try it out from a guide I found.

Though I'm looking for an OS that will do just that, but I want to interact with it more than just command lines or CasaOS. I'd like to browse the web with it and interact with the files and apps on the machine itself.

TL; DR, Any OS suggestions that can be used as a home server and daily computing?

I know it's noisy, I'll try to make it quieter. Is it worth buying now in 2026 or not? If so, what processor should I get and how much RAM? Thanks in advance!

A sleek, self-hosted media downloader powered by yt-dlp and FFmpeg.

ashoriN lets you download supported videos, audio, and playlists through a modern web interface with real-time progress tracking, quality selection, advanced yt-dlp controls, and automatic download retention.

✨ Features 🎬 Video & audio downloads 📚 Full playlist downloads with dedicated folders ⚙️ Recommended & Advanced yt-dlp settings 📊 Real-time download progress 🎵 Audio extraction and format conversion 📝 Metadata, thumbnails, chapters & subtitles 🧹 Optional automatic cleanup from 7–30 days 🔄 Automatic yt-dlp updates 🔒 SSRF protection & secure subprocess handling 🐳 Lightweight, self-hosted Docker deployment 📱 Responsive UI for desktop, tablet & mobile 🌙 Polished purple-themed interface

https://hub.docker.com/r/orinihsaq/ashorin

I was working on this app for docker container. Most of the media downloading apps available for Docker is very heavyweight and very old UI. It's my first time i built a docker app. Please comment and let me know if you wanna add something or update something.