If you have mechanical HDD you may want to get a foam lined case and anti static bags. That should be the best approach to avoid drive damage.
As for leaving things in the rack, I am concerned that road vibration could walk screws out. That would be bad.
Don’t see why this is news. “Intel continues to do the thing they almost always do”.
That was what I was attempting and failed to achieve.
You know how that old day ng gors. If you can’t beat them join them … in a joint venture where they get a stake in ownership and they train your employees how to more effectively build microchips.
I would stay away from kubernets/k3/k8s. Unless you want to learn it for work purposes, it’s so overkill you can spend a month before you get things running. I know from experience. My current setup gives you options and has been reliable for me.
NAS Box: Truenas Scale - You can have UnRaid fill this role.
Services Hosting: Proxmox - I can spin up any VMs I need and lots of info online to do things like hardware passthrough to VMs.
Containers: Debian VM - Debian makes a great server environment as it’s stable and well supported. I just make this VM a docker swarm host. I managed things with Portainer for a web interface.
I keep data on the NAS and have containers access it over the network. Usually a NFS share.
I have used audiobook shelf to read a couple of PDF files. Seemed to work fine. I mostly use it for audio books.