I have seen a couple of guys who acquired older generation storage "racks" which they "play with" in the weekends. Do they have the cooling? No. Does it affect their electricity bill? Very. But they want to learn that thing and want to play with it, which is understandable, as long as it's kept checked.

Not different from audiophiles who lose their way, actually.

I was a wannabe data-hoarder by accident, but I understood why I'm doing and decided to slim down drastically. I'm merging, deduplicating and deleting data step by step, because many of it is my own files from the days of yore, and I want to preserve some of them. To be frank, at this very moment I'm verifying that I have copied a bunch of files without corruption, so I can start working on them (sha256deep is an underappreciated tool).

Some of the datahoarders give me weird looks when I say, I'd rather have a single NUC with a couple of spinning drives for backing up what I care rather than having them all in a cabinet full of RAID arrays, but I already have them at work. I don't want another server at home (not because that I don't enjoy it, but I want to have some time touching actual grass).

Aren't all collecting hobbies like this? Stamps, music on vinyl, movie posters, retro computers, cars, etc all have very little additional utility for size > n.

Needing Debian 8 because that Lights Out connection requires JVM-something for the Java Web Start based console of the system.

Moreover, funnily, some newer servers work wonkier with more modern ipmitools and browser versions while connecting remotely. Intricacies of older embedded systems.

When you look at them, they really don't have the same style as netapp did at the time.

(or i'm wrong and senile.)