What I Use
despite many posts on this site talking about what you could build, some people want to know what I have. this is what i am working with right now, some of which I would change. I will note that below.
Top Server
| Piece | Part | Link |
| Case | I cant find it anymore | mine is either an athena power or istar 3U short depth that I got for ~$150 |
| Motherboard | Gigabyte B460M DS3H | https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16813145298 |
| CPU | Intel i3-10105 | https://www.newegg.com/intel-core-i3-10105-core-i3-10th-gen/p/N82E16819118248 |
| Heatsink | stock | |
| Memory | G.SKILL Aegis 16GB | https://www.newegg.com/g-skill-16gb-288-pin-ddr4-sdram/p/N82E16820232884 |
| GPU | integrated | |
| HDD | none | |
| SSD | samsung 850 evo 500gb | https://www.newegg.com/samsung-850-evo-500gb/p/N82E16820147373 |
| PSU | Corsair CX450M | https://www.newegg.com/corsair-cx-series-cx450m-450w/p/N82E16817139146 |
| Extras | Rosewill RSV-SATA-Cage-34 | https://www.newegg.com/rosewill-rsv-sata-cage-34-hard-disk-drive-cage/p/N82E16816132037 |
Bottom Server
what you should know about these parts are they are either scavenged from other PCs, bought from ebay, or purchased open-box from microcenter. thats why there may seem to be no rhyme or reason behind some of the choices.
dont try to replicate these exact parts. the idea is to show how a useful server can be built cheaply which is solid and functional. too many people try to buy the latest and greatest, and leave a ton of money and performance on the table due to the fact that servers just dont need that much to do what they do.
the top machine is my daily driver. youll notice it has almost nothing in it because it runs linux mint, which needs basically nothing. this is a web browsing / work machine which runs firefox, libreoffice, some VMs and thats pretty much it. the one extra it has is the HDD hot swap cage so I dont have to unmount it to add/remove a drive. best.feature.ever.
the bottom machine is my truenas server. its the nas for my entire life (backed up to storj) as well as my adblocker, cloud, media server, password manager, and vpn. its on the z490 platform because the linux 5.15 kernel which truenas scale runs doesnt like the iGPU + the b550 chipset. its guts are those 4 x4 TB ironwolfs. those things are amazing. they are in raidz1 so i get about 10.5TB usable which is more than I need. it boots off of the 128GB ssd and its apps/VMs are on the crucial 500GB. the HBA was added because the mobo only has 6 SATA ports and I want to be able to use any of the 12 hot swappable bays I have.
if I did it again, I would do these builds in traditional desktop cases. the reason for that is space. racks take up a lot of space, even short-depth open ones like I have. the daily driver would have been in a microATX case and the server would have been in the smallest tower I could fit those parts in. oh, a word on parts. I would also not use the drives I have now in the server. I would have done a mirror with 2 x 16TB Seagate Exos. then i wouldnt need the HBA, could have done a microATX, and then used a smaller case, probably a twin to the one above. i would also nix the GPU and tried to pass the iGPU through to the container for transcode, and switched all the SSDs to m.2. that would have been awesome.