My Wife Thinks I Bought Another Hard Drive

My wife walked past the desk this morning, noticed the latest addition and said "oh you bought another hard drive" Looking at the photo, I can understand the confusion. Four small metal boxes squeezed in around a monitor stand, surrounded by cables, don’t look particularly remarkable. They are certainly less conspicuous than a large computer with a glass side panel and flashing lights. Had she asked what they cost together, though, we might have ended up talking about a car socialist drive around in instead.

There are now four GB10 machines on the desk: two NVIDIA DGX Sparks on the left and two ASUS GX10s to the right of the monitor stand. I bought the ASUS pair at launch because they offered the same underlying NVIDIA GB10 platform for less money than NVIDIA’s own version. Since then, the pricing has changed enough that the two more recent purchases went the other way: NVIDIA’s Founder edition machines were cheaper than the Asus 4TB GX10s by a large margin, funny how the pricing can change in 7-8 months. I have no particular loyalty to either enclosure. The slightly mismatched collection is what happens when you buy whichever makes more sense at the time.

What the photo doesn’t show is that I wasn’t especially convinced by the first purchase. Shortly after buying the ASUS boxes, I wondered whether I had been too early made a bad buy, I even considered selling them on Tradera (think ebay for Swedes). I liked the hardware, but I wasn’t getting enough out of it to feel entirely comfortable with what I had spent. Since then, the hardware prices 3-4x, the software and models have caught up, and I have gone from questioning why I bought two to buying another two for a lot more than the first two Asus cost me. I probably should have bought all four at the original prices, but that is considerably easier to say now than it would have been when I was wondering whether the first pair was a mistake.

The third was an open-box Spark I found just before leaving for South Luangwa about 2-3 weeks ago. The fourth I ordered while I was still there, from the bush. I was seeing posts on X about Sparks going out of stock everywhere and prices rising in other markets, so I checked my usual dealer in Sweden. They had around twenty in stock, and compared with the prices I was seeing elsewhere, they still looked “cheap.” That word is doing quite a lot of work here, but I hit the buy button almost immediately. Apparently, travelling to the Zambian bush is not enough to put me out of reach of a hardware purchase.

I could make the fourth sound like the result of a carefully considered capacity plan, but the posts about availability definitely helped me make up my mind. So did already owning three. I was organising the workloads around pairs, which gave me a useful practical reason to round things off. There is nothing technically wrong with having three machines. I just found the argument for four much more appealing once the third was mine.

The setup now is two linked machines for coding and another two for vLLM (uncensored models), writing models and Comfy workloads since alot of the work i send to cloud is getting rejected "sensitive" as I'm also in the lingerie business generating woman in lingerié isn't what american AI companies think is fine to generate as you might be aroused by the result? :) - My M3 Ultra Mac Studio is still my main workstation, including the photography and video work. The GB10 machines give the AI workloads somewhere else to run without competing with everything I am doing on the Mac. Having two pairs also means I can leave one working while I use the other for something else, rather than continually deciding what to stop or unload. That is the part I appreciate in everyday use.

Although my plan is to experiment with running the 4 all together, but the hardware shortage is real, i have been searching all parts of the internet for Mikrotek CSR804 but they are sold out globally, and this is a NICHE product normally. I might have an opening on a CSR812 in two weeks from a Poland source, we see if that plays out or not.

A lot of the appeal is being able to give them work without thinking about whether I should spend the tokens on it. I want to run coding jobs 24/7, leave longer tasks going, experiment with models and try something again when the first result isn’t good enough. I also want investment analysis and other private work to stay local. Im also experimenting with customer service and we do not want to send this to an external AI, we wan't to keep it in-house for privacy. None of that makes the hardware free to operate, and there is still plenty of time spent getting things working. But I am getting much more use out of the machines now, which makes the original purchase easier to feel good about.

The pricing has changed how I think about waiting, too. I used to be reasonably comfortable assuming that a little patience would get me more hardware for less money, the usual play was to be chill wait until initial gear heads (like me) bought, and then buy when the price start to come down, thats how it used to work now its pretty much the opposite, funny!. Watching the GX10s become more expensive has made me less confident in that assumption. I don’t know where prices go next, and buying because something might become more expensive is a very convenient way to justify buying something you already want. In this case, though, I had work for the machine, the Swedish price still looked reasonable by comparison, and it was available. I didn’t feel much need to spend the rest of the trip debating it.

I wrote the more rational version of this in August, when I had the two ASUS boxes: why I wanted local capacity and why owning the hardware appealed to me. I’m much happier with the setup now than I was shortly after that first purchase. There are still things to improve and software to sort out, but the machines are earning their place on the desk. Expensive, yes, but I’m very pleased with them.

Naturally, I have already caught myself wondering whether I should buy another two. Perhaps another four? I’m not doing that right now, although I realise the last two words leave rather a lot of room. For the moment, I’m happy with my four “hard drives.”