fair question - to me 'server' means focus on compute (and storage). high power, high performance, somewhat redundant loud piece of equipment that is still down is common component failed. for my own homelab I went instead for all of my 'compute' needs to Proxmox and clustered 3x HP SF001 hardware pieces when Walmart was getting rid of it for $75 new , with warranty. Microcenter was giving away i7-10700 cheaply when for 16 cores and after adding basic SSD and 32 GB RAM I have myself a cluster of 3 notes to play/work with, that draw very little from the wall (<10W idle consumption), give me full hardware redundancy, etc. So my need is not compute at this point. This gives me 48 cores of i7-10700 + 96 GB of RAM to work across VMs and containers, with little power, and hardware redundancy. and learning Proxmox was cool
thank you - what is the power consumption on these servers? I think the CPUs themselves are 13 years old. our electricity in IL is $0.13-$0.14 per kWh here in USA/Illinois. Reddit search says ~100W without the drives..I'd say a r520 or r530 then- since all your drives are SATA you don't need power hungry sas controllers. Run 1x e5-26xxL v3/v4 series cpu (you have the option to expand later since r5x series are dual processors capable but are usually fitted with just 1). 1 p/s and you're golden. Plus you have 6 or 12 3.5 drive bays- perfect if you ever decide to expand in the future.
Dell Poweredge R530 Server Intel Xeon E5-2620v3 2.4GHz 32GB DDR4, No HDD, No OS | eBay
Manufacturer : Dell.www.ebay.com
one item - one point of failure. we can think of it being redundant this or that (PSU, etc) however it is still one motherboard, one BIOS (you upgrade or tinker with it, everything is down), and most of the item overpowered for what it needs to do function wise... if instead if have a compute node( or nodes on my case), well they are not expected to have any slow storage or much storage (SSD is still expensive if you start going into multiple TBs) and they NFS to storage server/NAS.
My r420 idled @ 80w with drives, and does it matter that the CPUs are 13 years old when the alternative are AMD CPUs that can barely compete even though they were launched in 2017.
ok, thank you. FWIW I think AMD caught up and passed intel by around 2017-2018 and now far passed Intel.. Ryzen 3 and 4 is better, faster, lower power, and better node tech when anything Intel had recently... Prior to 2017 and around 2013 the Bulldozer was bull..
