It's fairly minimal compared to the amount of microplastics that go down the drain every time someone washes a load of laundry made from synthetic fibers. At least PLA dust will break down a bit faster than many of the other microplastics.
Normal DVDs are not good for archival. Cheap ones can degrade in less than 10 years. You want to get the M-disc ones for long term storage.
LTO tape is good for 30 years when properly stored. You should be transferring the data to a newer format much sooner than that anyways. LTO drives are only backwards compatible for 1 or 2 versions, so you probably won't be able to find a working drive that can read your tape 30 years later.
Is it x264 or AV1? They are two completely different codecs. If it's AV1, you may not have hardware acceleration since it's fairly new. It takes a lot of power to software decode AV1 and you will get dropped frames if the CPU can't keep up.
I've never had to defragment the ext4 drives in my server. Ext4 is fairly resistant to fragmentation.
Solar panels are already quite cheap. What we need is much cheaper grid forming inverters so we can stop destabilizing the grid with solar.
You basically need a supercomputer for windows 11 to not run like complete shit. Linux will run well on 15 year old hardware, although I wouldn't suggest anything that old if you care about power consumption.
The card is rated for 180 watts. It has a single 8 pin power connector, which means the maximum it could possibly draw is 225W. Pick a power supply that will provide that plus whatever the rest of the computer draws. I would suggest oversizing the power supply a bit so you don't use more than about 75% of it's rated output.
I haven't had any issues with my RX 6700 XT. It works great for games and CAD. I've never gotten the video encoding working though. I think it needs the proprietary drivers.
I picked this little scope up from the Seapac swap meet a week and a half ago for $3. It turns out that all it needed was some contact cleaner to get it working again.
This is a portable scope that can run from 12V DC as well as an internal battery. I don't have the battery for it, but I could probably put some 18650's in there if I disable the built in charger.
You can find used Thinkcenters pretty cheap with AMD CPUs. I recently got an M75s Gen2 with a Ryzen 3 4350G for around $100.