Agreed. I'm just glad no one is filming me when I'm working on things. It's not that I can't figure things out but it takes some trial and error.
I watch the channel with that in mind, he's me in a sense ... Trying to reforest 300 something acres. He seems like a smart guy though and making progress. It's all cumulative work so it'll pick up I'm sure after a year of growth.
I had an Intel s2600 with dual Xeon and 120 gigs of RAM. It seems like such a good idea to run that as a home server. However, the amount of power that it used because it was older was way too much.
I ended up hunting on eBay and found an old Asus motherboard, Intel chip, ram, and a pny Nvidia card.
I bought refurb hard drives from serverpartdeals and a new case from Amazon.
I recommend starting with a chassis you want and working backwards to help narrow your scope.
I know you wanted smaller but heres what I bought. SilverStone Technology CS382... https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CKTYSZV9?ref=ppx_pop_mob_ap_share
Also, I run truenas scale with a bunch of apps. Ssd z1 for os. Ssd z1 for transcode and caches. And then 4 drive set for main storage and another 4 drive set for backup of the first set.