Back in the day (when I was still a working stiff) I built out an AMD FX-8320 (8-core) system with 32GB of RAM and 3 or 4 TB of storage. This was my ESXi lab where I could replicate whatever I was working on at the office. Eventually, I tried running Hyper-V on this machine, as we were exploring cost cutting options at a new job, but I wasn’t a fan. After retirement, I decided to resurrect this machine (which was sitting under a desk gathering dust) as a Proxmox server, but then I found something better…
A local seller on Craigslist was offloading old PCs from a local bank for $75/each. These were Dell Optiplex 7020 SFF boxes with with 16GB RAM, no Drives and an i5-8500 (6-core) CPU. I had been considering replacing my FX box with a few N100 boxes which I expected would deliver about the same performance, but at a fraction of the power draw. Each of these Dell machines would draw about half the power of my FX box while delivering 40% more performance and cost less than half what I expected to spend on the new N100 boxes. Sounds like a winner to me.
In the bargain, these Optiplex machines have an M.2 slot, three open memory slots (for a total capacity of 64GB) and the tiny boxes can be stacked horizontally or vertically. Now to be fair, they don’t have a lot of storage bays or PCIe expansion slots, but they had enough for me.
I ended up buying 4 of these tiny workhorses ($75 each), three for my new Proxmox cluster and one for my Proxmox Dev/Test box. I added some memory to bring each machine up to 32GB ($24 each), keeping 2 slots open for future expansion (if necessary). I ended up using some cheap 16GB Optane M.2 modules ($4.33 each) for the boot drives, a 250GB Velociraptor ($5.30 each) and a 480GB SSD (~$30 each) for VM Storage on each machine. Since internal storage bays were limited, I tossed in some 10GB NICs ($15 each + $2.57x2 for the SFPs) to connect to my NFS server and the PBS (running on my wife’s old desktop). All total, I think I built out my new environment for much less than the original price of my of old FX machine (which has now become my desktop). The only new parts I used were the Velociraptors (which turned out to be new), the 480GB SSDs that I had purchased over the last 12 months, the 10G switch ($96.71) and fiber patch cables ($4 per) to go with it.
I see a lot of Toobers (you have probably seen them too), building out crazy machines, networks and back-end servers to allow them to edit their videos over the network. While it can be loads of fun to buy/build new toys, for most of us (who do not edit video) we can have a whole lot of fun for a fraction of the cost. So spend your nickels and dimes wisely, don’t fall for the hype, build something that meets your needs and learn something interesting in the process!
Cheers!