You can go with something like this if you want a clean solution.

I use a drive dock station for my backup drives, and I have a few of these for one-offs too.

Crucial is fine. It’s commonly found in corporate and government workstations.

I don’t use RCS myself, but there are recent posts on the GOS forums and it appears to be working fine once all of the prerequisites are installed.

Sure, like I said above, GOS doesn’t at all prevent you from rooting the device. They only discourage it from a security point of view. Regarding MicroG, I’ve never had need for it myself but I’ve read many other posts over the years from users who have installed it on GOS in lieu of Graphene’s own implementation.

I would argue that overall GrapheneOS provides more control over the OS than some other Android-based operating systems.

They don’t.

You can root GOS like any other Android-based OS. It’s just highly discouraged, completely unsupported and, in the opinion of the GOS devs, you will no longer be considered to be running GOS since you are compromising the core OS by doing so.

You’ve clearly done your homework, and you’ve gotten a lot of good feedback already, so I’ll just add a few points…

• Storage options: Personally, I’d replace the existing drive with the highest capacity I could afford. In an ideal situation, I’d keep the host on another drive (NVMe or flash) and dedicate the large drive to a single partition of data storage.

  In my own mini-PC (8th gen NUC), I’ve got a smaller NVMe for Proxmox and a single 8TB internal SSD for data.

• Encryption: If you’re going to bother with encryption, I wouldn’t half-ass it. Why bother at all if you’re fine using auto-decryption or a weak password that will be guessed with any sizeable effort? Just lock it down with a strong password and decrypt/mount the data drive after any reboot; making a shell alias or script for this is trivial. You’re likely not rebooting the server more than once a week anyway.

• Budget/Specs: I get the sense you don’t have much budget right now, but knowing your hardware would help in suggesting solutions. Do you have an NVMe slot? What is the make/model of the motherboard and case?

• Filesystem: For simple storage, this really doesn’t matter and Ext4 will probably be fine. It’s a mature, robust, no-frills filesystem which is perfect for bulk file storage (docs, music, videos, etc.), but Btrfs would be fine too if you want more options.

• USB Docking Stations: I’ve had really good experiences with USB docking stations like this one, and I currently use it for attaching my backup HDDs each month. I wouldn’t want to rely on them for realtime data access, but they do work wonderfully for backups and one-off drive access.

Amazon typically has a few vendors that specialize in refurbished Optiplexes and/or HP Elites in small or ultra small form factor sizes.

A word of caution about these refurbs though…the memory and storage they include are often dollar store brands (Kingfast) that I wouldn’t even trust for a child’s PC. It’s worth purchasing your own after the fact.

Your options will depend on many things…

• How much storage is needed?
• Is RAID important to you?
• Is power usage a concern?
• Noise level?

I don’t know how demanding photoprism is, but you could probably do fine with a refurbished i5/i7 Dell Optiplex or similar, with one or more SSDs added to it. If money is really tight and storage needs are high, you could go with mechanical drives instead.

The problem with enterprise servers is that are generally very loud and use a lot of power…not unlike adding a second refrigerator to your environment. In my opinion, they’re not worth it unless you have a specific use case (training for a career, etc.).

The dropbear method is more secure overall, and I plan to incorporate it as well when I find the time to wipe/reinstall my server, but it’s arguably not as easy or simple, which is what OP requested.

As mentioned elsewhere, the easiest method is to encrypt only the data drives. This way you can secure shell into the server upon restart and decrypt the data. I’ve been using this method for years now without issue.

I’ve been super happy with my 8th gen Intel NUC i5. I put it in an Akasa Turing fanless case, installed an NVMe for host OS, and an 8TB SSD for data. It’s low power and so quiet that I couldn’t imagine ever using fans again.
I also have a USB 3.2 drive dock for external backup HDDs, but I only turn it on when actively doing a monthly backup.

8TB holds more media than I’ll ever need, but I do trim movies and shows regularly. For some, 8TB won’t be anywhere near enough, and SSDs exceeding this are ridiculously expensive.

I was able to extract the img from the ISO using geteltorito as described in section 5 of this ArchWiki article. Once you mount the resulting img file, you’ll end up with the same file contents achieved by running their Windows BIOS Utility through wine.

The relevant binaries appear to be under the folders, N24ET76P and N24ET76W. Both scan clean for me, for whatever that’s worth:

curl -X POST -F'file=@N24ET76P/$0AN2400.FL1' https://pk.fail
{"details":{"analysis-time":"1.395106993s","hashes":{"md5":"ba73792a5fc831ca84b4cd3a21c03247","sha1":"24a5bb42d670c7705aed06588f0092ec11a32564","sha256":"b9510c73657460ae24c550b71d217a543b0fc3c30a3e081eff31d9d8f1a2bdda","sha512":"8ef6f0dcffbca05b79710b8599b1b1c926ee59185a675bc7eeede6da040c751097303ada523611271de6aaf190a597cdd6e9d5cf564d06987abcf712f61227c6"}},"status":"not-vulnerable"}

curl -X POST -F'file=@N24ET76W/$0AN2400.FL1' https://pk.fail
{"details":{"analysis-time":"1.438471526s","hashes":{"md5":"de1551b0bcc73e19375f7111def72278","sha1":"cd41f36d018f940c308a7be25a20e81bdb7e4cf2","sha256":"b3f646095e47bb94f04390c756cb4133201b1231a8b224174f10bb06bd3835f2","sha512":"55143f4903f92d88057bc9d4232b0d328e9ace36330f35fafdf0485d8bebb3f79b9fedc88ab1dec7fc04a8a3e0890887c1dd7632a2ffa397fb0917be90e3f93f"}},"status":"not-vulnerable"}

The linux command mentioned in the Ars Technica article elsewhere here is efi-readvar -v PK. For Fedora and Arch users, efi-readvar is available in the efitools package.

Edit: Clarity

An ISO is just another archive format, similar to zip, tarballs, and rar files. Most modern archive tools can open and/or extract its contents like any other archive.

Edit:

It looks like Lenovo releases their ISOs formatted as a CD image. See: https://workaround.org/article/updating-the-bios-on-lenovo-laptops-from-linux-using-a-usb-flash-stick/

I can’t say for certain, but I think you just have to grab the last firmware binary released for your T480 from the Lenovo website and run it through the online validator: https://pk.fail/

If ambient noise is a concern, I’d go with an SSD. If money is tight, an HDD will give you the best value.

My server is in an otherwise quiet home office/sitting room, so I went with an 8TB SSD (870 QVO). Spinning disks make a fair bit of noise just waking up, let alone the actual file operations.

Haha, oh I know and I’m all for trying things for the fun of it! Just wondered if there was a practical benefit of such a setup.

Interesting endeavor…any practical benefits? I would think that even a slow USB 2.0 drive would provide better performance than a cloud-based file system.

Craigslist is still superior in the PNW, at least in my experience.

I’ve enjoyed seeing some of these blasts from the past, but I admit it’s not as nice when the VM host window is captured as well. Just something to consider… I appreciate it all the same.