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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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)
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?
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.