Tyler Morgan

If you have ever watched a file copy crawl between two computers on your home network, you have felt the pain of plain gigabit ethernet. I have been there too, staring at 110 MB/s transfer speeds while my Cat6 cables sat there doing nothing. The Best 2.5GbE Switches for the Money solve that problem without … Read more

I’ve been running a home lab for the better part of a decade, and the single upgrade that transformed my setup more than any other was getting a proper server rack. Before that, my gear lived on a precarious stack of shelves, with cables spilling out like spaghetti and equipment running hotter than it should. … Read more

I have been carrying a Steam library in my bag for four years, and the category has changed more in 2026 than the previous three years combined. Handheld gaming PCs finally run almost any Steam game you own, the Steam Deck OLED is gorgeous, and the new wave of AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme and Intel … Read more

When I built my first home lab rack three years ago, I stuffed Cat6 cables directly into my switch and called it a day. Within six months I was tracing cables by hand, unplugging the wrong ports, and wondering why my network closet looked like a bowl of spaghetti. That is when I learned what … Read more

Last year, I lost three days of work on my home server because of a five-minute power blip. The file system went read-only, the database refused to mount, and my virtual machines vanished mid-write. I spent an entire weekend rebuilding what a $200 battery could have prevented. If you run a home server, NAS, virtualization … Read more

I lost a 12TB Synology array to a summer thunderstorm two years ago. One second of brownout, and three of my drives threw SMART errors that RAID could not fix. That was the week I started taking UPS backups for my NAS seriously, and since then I have tested dozens of units on Synology, QNAP, … Read more

I lost an entire home server to a brownout last year. The simulated sine wave UPS I had been using let the active PFC power supply shut down mid-write, and I watched a RAID array scramble itself. That mistake sent me down the rabbit hole of testing pure sine wave UPS units, and I have … Read more

I lost two SSDs and a ZFS pool to a freak summer storm last year. One minute my Proxmox cluster was humming along, the next second everything was dark and the lead-acid UPS I’d trusted for years just gave up. That was the day I started testing LiFePO4 UPS for home labs for real, and … Read more

If you have ever stared at a tangle of wall warts behind your rack, you already know why the best PDUs for server racks matter more than people think. I run a home lab with two gaming servers for old-school Lineage 2 and Silkroad Online, and I learned the hard way that a cheap office … Read more

The best battery backups for gaming PCs in are the single most important accessory most gamers never buy. I learned this the hard way when a summer brownout killed my RTX 3080 mid-match, and the replacement cost hit my wallet harder than any game bundle ever will. A quality UPS (uninterruptible power supply) gives you … Read more