I’ve had good luck with goharddrive.com. They sell through amazon as well, but I believe they ship direct. I usually get the hgst, or now wd, ultrastar hard drives. I’ve had zero issues.

I do and it’s fine.

I used to have a separate machine for server stuff but it just cost more in electricity since I would leave them both on 24x7 anyway.

I’ve got 64G of ram and I often use up to 48 of it with various VMs. I wouldn’t get any power savings with a separate server since I have a cron job to transcode everything that plex recorded off of TV during the day to av1 for disk space savings (usually turns 3GB of mpeg2 into 700MB of av1), so I would need a server with a moderately powerful cpu anyway for that.

I have a ryzen 3700X. got it since it was the highest performance that was still 65w tdp at the time, didn’t want to spend a ton on electricity and extra air conditioning since I would be leaving it running 24x7.

The only time I notice a performance impact during gaming is if my windows 11 vm is running, I don’t really need that one running 24x7 so I shut that one down if it happens to be running at the time.

Not having to deal with split horizon dns or nat hairpinning is pretty nice, especially with so many things using DoH with public resolvers nowadays, like android or firefox.

I just put A and AAAA in public dns so things work either ipv4 or ipv6 on the outside. On the inside everything works on and prefers ipv6 so it just works on the inside too. Nothing ever even attempts to use the wrong (public) A record on the inside.