My opinion: Don’t buy a new/factory Dell SFF or Micro for a homelab unless you’re experienced. If you’re new you need to get a feel for exactly what you what you want. And that’s important because these machines are expensive on the Dell site and you can get solid machines for some fraction of the price on eBay.

I don’t know your aim but if you want performance: you have two PCIe slots so you could put a 10GbE card in each Optiplex then switch with a Mikrotik CRS305.

That draws a lot more power than I would have expected. Are you including literally everything in the diagram in that number (ie including cameras etc)? Also, do you happen to know how the power consumption breaks down on a per machine basis?

I see your comments are being downvoted but I have a different perspective on this.

First I get why the downvotes are there. You can’t really go into an aviation community as a fighter pilot and be like, I’m afraid whatever random commercial airplane I’m on is just going to crash. I mean you could- I’ve seen it here on Reddit - but, many in the community are going to look at it a bit strangely. Perhaps understandably so from their perspective.

Here’s the thing, though. They’re not you, and you’re not necessarily wrong to feel the way you do.

First you’ve got to acknowledge the reality of the situation and understand the actual risk. Once you can separate the facts from the irrational fear, you’re not wrong on this.

Now, on the irrational fear part, I’d say: address it!

This subreddit has no requirement to justify your setup. If there were, almost no one would be posting here. Beyond that though, the whole point of this sub is to explore, build and share own lab. That lab can be whatever. There’s people here with 100GbE. There’s people here with dozens of cores. There’s people here running large tape backups. And they’re all doing all kinds of things from Plex to ai to whatever. I could go on. Again, no one has to defend it.

So if you look at your lab and say to yourself- I really don’t like the idea of a fire, and maybe it wouldn’t happen, but wouldn’t it be cool if I had something where I never had to worry about the smallest chance of it happening? Then this sub is the perfect place to explore addressing it: spec and buy the right hardware. Design and integrate monitoring and protection systems into it. Tie it all into home assistant or whatever. Then come back and share what you came up with.

As long as you can have a handle on the reality of the situation, you’re good. After all, there’s people here with HA setups for their lab - that they do no production…or dev… on. There’s people that run ECC for fun. There’s people that have more than one or two (dozen) TBs more than they can publicly defend…

Again, if you feel the concern, do something about it and share what you’ve done. Just don’t let it own you.