Living in salt country, I’ve found heat and percussion to be helpful. Hold a soldering iron to the nut for 3-5 minutes, then wail on it with a rubber mallet. Repeat a few times if needed. Usually loosens up the fastener because it dislodges the gunk in the threads.
Either Rain Man, Rocky Horror Picture Show, or Clue, depending on how I’m feeling that day.
I started with your tier 3 and moved down to tier 2 because of power costs. I work for an MSP, so I have essentially infinite free last gen hardware from the ecycling pile, but the power consumption was too high. I’m in the process of moving from a Dell 720 rackmount to an HP EliteDesk 800 G5-SFF with 32 gigs of RAM that I put a pair of 4TB drives into, plus the 1TB on-baord NVME. Once I finish this migration I should save on the order of 250 watts, or 6 kWh per day, for a savings of about $40/mo in electricity. It’s worth taking your electric rate into account when you size your hardware, and figure out how long your ROI is for that decision.
For storage, I have a 16-bay rackmount server chassis for my NAS with 8TB drives (see MSP comment above) so I don’t have a good suggestion for consumer-grade hardware there. I know 16 spinning drives are pricey power-wise, but I just can’t give up 100+ TB. I’m pondering adding another DAS shelf to grow the array even further, though that will eat a bunch of the power savings moving off of the 720. For the time being, the inertia of not ordering a PowerVault enclosure is saving me money,
Yeah, I joined Piefed because I appreciated seeing the cross posts all on one page and the ability to tag users. As I notice more comments disappearing, I’m beginning to rethink my main instance.