Have you tried using a different SATA cable. I had one go bad and the drive started throwing all kinds of errors.

RAID isn’t an alternative to a backup. If a second drive fails while rebuilding the RAID-5 array, all of the data will be lost.

If the computer has a serial port, you can use SLIP to get an internet connection. Then you could host a simple website from it. It will run at dial-up speeds and you may have to write your own software though.

If you’re buying a PC for OPNsense or pfSense, look for one with Intel NICs. Realtek NICs tend to be unreliable.

Cloudflare won’t even allow you to use your own nameserver. Avoid them like the plague.

If the RAM was cheap and performed well, I would buy it. I wouldn’t trust a no name hard drive though.

It’s not really worth the trouble to try to host your own e-mail. There are lots of e-mail hosts that you can use with your own domain. A few of them are free and there are plenty of low cost ones. As long as you use your own domain, you can switch hosts whenever you want and keep your addresses.

Syncthing and Nextcloud are both FOSS. You don’t need to sign up for anything.

That motherboard has a very limited number of PCIe lanes. Using the second m.2 slot will slow down the second GPU. All of the other slots are coming from the chipset and are only PCIe 2.0.

I would get rid of the second GPU, then there would be enough lanes to run 3 SSDs at PCIe 3.0 x4.

It looks like the fix is just disabling the algif_aead kernel module. That prevented the proof of concept script from working on everything I tested it on. Hopefully they will get some kernel updates out soon.

Mobile apps bit rot pretty quickly when they stop updating them. A web UI would be better. A server or internet connection is not needed, a web UI can be hosted directly on the device.