I’m looking to pick up a low cost server to use for my burgeoning home lab. Something to throw Proxmox onto and run a few VMs. I like the look and cost of refurb’d HP Elitedesk 800 G3/G4s on eBay, especially because they have a PCIe slot for a 10GBe SFP card. But I also have a few HDDs I was hoping to throw in for storage. Can the HPs be case swapped into something 3 or 4U short-depth and handle storage as well, or would another machine be a good choice? Hoping to keep the total (PC + case) under $250-300.
Thanks!
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These boxes have limitations. Disk bays are one of those limitations. You get one and maybe two 3.5 bays tops. You can add a HBA and external drives, but then no 10Gb networking. What is your use case that needs 10Gb? Could you live with 2.5G?
Personally I am not a fan of HP stuff.
I recently put together a Lenovo P520 Workstation and it’s been phenomenal - can hit your target budget no problem. (It’s a tower fyi).
HP = Horrible Products (their printers are the worst)
HPE = Hell of Paywall’d Equipment (decent hardware, shitty business practice)
Used Dell Optiplex can be a good value. Can get 6 cores, an expansion slot, Intel QSV for Plex. Might not have space or PSU connections for HDDs, because most cheap, small PCs have SSDs these days.
A lot of the cheap mass produced PCs will have limited motherboard/PSU combinations. Even if they have a SATA port, they’re probably not going to have multiple HDD power connections. You would run into that problem with the HP Elitedesk too, unless you got a new power solution.