THE CRUNCH
A tech enthusiast has assembled a home lab Proxmox server and a gaming laptop using components rescued from a local county landfill. The builder, known as Tsuto, raids the site's electronics recycling bin once a week, salvaging SSDs, HDDs, GPUs, and RAM. The resulting Proxmox rig features two mirrored 256GB SSDs for the operating system, a 1TB SSD for fast storage, and three 2TB HDDs in RAID1 for ZFS storage. The lab
also includes a rescued Asus ROG laptop that required only a $25 battery replacement to run casual titles like Stumble Guys. While the scavenged parts are largely older, the builder notes that components like AM4 motherboards and DDR4 RAM are still highly sought after. To complete the system, Tsuto purchased a Core i7-7700 and 64GB of RAM from Amazon, likely to avoid the inflated prices of current retail stock.