PC related:
Had a Shuttle SH170R6 chassis which was slated to be one of two primary shack VM hosts. One Win10, Win7/32 and XP guests running concurrently on each. These support various scanner and receiver control programs; none of which likes to run on anything later than Win7. The Win10 VMs will host copies of ProScan (for the Bearcat P.25-capable radios in the scanner lineup).
Since the chassis provides support for an NVMe 2280 drive, I decided to go that route for a boot device. The VM host drive is a 2TB SSD and the warm backup device will be a pair of Iron Wolf or similar datacenter-spec HDDs of 8-16TB capacity. An all-in-one reader with hot-pluggable SATA accommodates another 1TB SSD for use with timeshift or as a general/portable storage area.
CPU is an i7-7700K and RAM is maxed at 64GB.
For whatever reason, the Mint 21 "Vera" installer USB was corrupt on creation so I had to go the route of 20.2 -> 20.3 (upgrade) -> 21.1 (upgrade) -> 21.2 (upgrade). Serial I/O will be handled by a 4-port StarTech PCIe card with the onboard COM Port making up Port #5 - this for use with a KAM Plus. I also got ahold of a Hauppauge HVR-1800 and am going to put that in the other PCIe slot for multimedia usage via the host O/S. If it doesn't work there's another serial adapter or video card waiting to take its place...
The system boots to console, from which I can start the X session if desired. From end of BIOS splash to login prompt is 3 whole (count 'em) seconds. Quite a jump from my early professional days in the PC world, where a 386/16MB system running OS/2 Warp 4 took 5 minutes to boot and stabilize the desktop. It even makes the current shack system (i7-3770K w/32GB RAM) look like a dog, and this thing's no slouch either.
