honestly depending on your budget and performance requirements, any pc made in the last 5 years + a SAS controller (for use with DIRT cheap datacenter SAS drives) should work. if you need it for more of a SAN setup and not just a media/backup server, grab a couple 10/25/40 gig NICs as well. ECC is limiting and probably overkill, and technology grows so fast that a $40 ryzen 3500X arguably going to be more performant (and MANY times quieter/more efficient) than any cheap xeon setup people suggest. it also blows that pants off an i3-7100, and allows you to use 3-4 full generations of motherboards, which means room for another cheap upgrade path in the future.
$30 - craigslist a PSU
$30 - craigslist some DDR4
$40 - x370/470/570 motherboard
$40 - just about any ryzen that isn’t first gen. as mentioned you can occasionally grab 3500X for as low as $40-$50. at 6C/6T it’s not the best choice for virtualization, so budget in another $20-30 for something with a lil more oomph if that’s a requirement.
$30 - SAS HBA like an LSI 92xx/93xx
$50 - if you dont mind fiddling with old crap and need speed, 2x connectx-3 56gbe NICs and a DAC or AOC. closer to $100 if you want something simpler/more supported like some 10gbe cards that use cat6.
$120 - 10x 4TB SAS drives from ebay
$50 - craigslist/amazon a case
$75 - for all the cables and bits i’m definitely forgetting
that’s ~$550 for 20-30TB+ of protected and fairly fast storage, with a path for some cheap incremental upgrades.
just my 2 cents!
honestly depending on your budget and performance requirements, any pc made in the last 5 years + a SAS controller (for use with DIRT cheap datacenter SAS drives) should work. if you need it for more of a SAN setup and not just a media/backup server, grab a couple 10/25/40 gig NICs as well. ECC is limiting and probably overkill, and technology grows so fast that a $40 ryzen 3500X arguably going to be more performant (and MANY times quieter/more efficient) than any cheap xeon setup people suggest. it also blows that pants off an i3-7100, and allows you to use 3-4 full generations of motherboards, which means room for another cheap upgrade path in the future.
$30 - craigslist a PSU
$30 - craigslist some DDR4
$40 - x370/470/570 motherboard
$40 - just about any ryzen that isn’t first gen. as mentioned you can occasionally grab 3500X for as low as $40-$50. at 6C/6T it’s not the best choice for virtualization, so budget in another $20-30 for something with a lil more oomph if that’s a requirement.
$30 - SAS HBA like an LSI 92xx/93xx
$50 - if you dont mind fiddling with old crap and need speed, 2x connectx-3 56gbe NICs and a DAC or AOC. closer to $100 if you want something simpler/more supported like some 10gbe cards that use cat6.
$120 - 10x 4TB SAS drives from ebay
$50 - craigslist/amazon a case
$75 - for all the cables and bits i’m definitely forgetting
that’s ~$550 for 20-30TB+ of protected and fairly fast storage, with a path for some cheap incremental upgrades.