Published May 15, 2026, 11:00 AM EDT Jeff's been involved in the IT industry since before the Internet and spent more than 20 years working in technical support, system administration, network administration, and consulting roles. He holds an undergraduate degree in English, a Master's degree in English with a focus on professional writing and editing, and another Master's degree in Computing & Information Systems. After teaching university English and computer science for a few years, Jeff launched his writing career . He's written for Macworld , Tom's Hardware , groovyPost , The Mac Observer , and more before beginning here at XDA. For a while, I kept treating my next home server build like it needed to be a miniature workstation. I looked at Ryzen 7 and Ryzen 9 chips, priced out motherboards with more PCIe lanes than I needed, and convinced myself that “headroom” was the same thing as a plan. It felt sensible on paper because nobody wants to rebuild a server six months after putting it together.…