what is wrong with old good LSA 2008 based HBAs with SAS-to-Oculink cable? and for NVMe part, adapter is just port format converter, pick any.

It would be useful to know laptop spec. In general, do not bother power consumption should be lower enough as it is.

Usually it can be solved by talking to hotel stuff. you are paying for that service and can expect it be suitable for any legal use.

Stay with TP-Link. Ubiquity done some strange things recently.

Yes, it will. Will it make any difference for you, depends of what are you doing. I would not use surveillance drive in to server, they are way too specific. Outside of that prices is pretty much same per TB/(Warranty Year) accross the board.

I done some excessive research couple of years back on the topic. you can find it here https://blog.holms.place/2022/05/01/hdd-storage-cost-comparation-may-2022.html. I do not think situation have changed match since than. Price per TB/Year is nearly constant past 8GB size.

Also consider looking to re-certified drives, or even refurbished drives. you may save hips on them. But it depends on how much you value your data, how much redundancy in you storage pool and how good your backup strategy.

Look to other orchestrations solution too, like SALT. If you need to manage a lot of servers it is live saver. Setting up is only first step.

Depends what are you doing. Something like keep base os patched is pretty much nil efforts. Some apps more problematic than others. Home Assistant is always a pain to upgrade and something like postfix is requires nearly 0 maintenance.

Very strange line from specs.
USB Driver Windows XP/7/8/10/11, Linux (driver free on Raspberry Pi Raspbian system)
Does it mean binary blob driver only? and you need to pay for it to use it on PC?

using wildcards is really bad security practice. and at age of ACME absolutely unnecessary.

VyOS: Debian based router + firewall. Linux makes it easier for people to pick up the CLI but I’ve heard complaints about it being difficult to follow. Currently CLI only, at least without third-party solutions, but is powerful and competes directly with OPNsense for features for the most part. Seems to be just as stable. my mistake, FOSS version is not LTS but a rolling release and needs to be compiled.

Very misleading statement. Both rolling and LTS are FOSS, they just do not provide LTS binaries for free. Want LTS? build it yourself , all tools and guides(bit outdated) is out there. It will took 30 min you your time to setup.

I do not understand why everyone calling hosting email difficult? IT is like 5 RFC you need to read and implement. Sofware wise you will need mail agent, something for DKIM ( if it not build in in agent), "local delivery agent" ( probably presenting it as IMAP) + mail reader of your choice. Nothing too complex

I would add, Corral TPU is nearly essential. But do not forgot about video decoding acceleration. I'm running couple of 4k H.265 cameras without HW acceleration, and ffmpeg consumes good amount of CPU out of my Ryzen 3600. So pick hardware which can decode streams from your cameras.