Posted: 1/2/2026 7:22:23 PM EDT
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I need to sell some of the but shipping servers sucks and the local market sucks even more. I hate to trash them but even getting $250 each locally isn’t a reality. It sucks as they’re all Supermicro X10 series motherboards but I’m getting tired of looking at them. I’m just venting about my stupidity I guess. Attached File Attached File |
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I do NOT envy your electric bill with that old gear powered up. I had a wooden/2x4 redneck "equipment rack" I built years ago for housing stuff from work Although I would proud of it at the time, it just took up too much fucking space. Save the APC/UPSs and sell the RAM and CPUs on fleabay. Recycle the rest - seriously RAM/CPUs are still going to premium prices on server grade DDR3/DDR4 these day. 10" mini rack is all I care to walk around these days. Repasted the coolers/fan units on my stack of Lenovo m920q units and 3D printed 10" mounts for everything. APC 1500 + BP24 battery extender makes life so much easier. I still need a good ip/KVM, though. |
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I actually only have 3 of the servers running 24/7 currently. I did give one to work to use as a Proxmox Backup Server for our cluster as I wanted file level restore ability. I like the idea of a 10 inch rack but I’m trying to figure out how to do bulk storage as 130TB of flash storage just isn’t going to happen. I did just delete 16TB of movies and TV shows so it’s a start but that’s only a single 3.5” HDD. Finding any kind of micro PC where I can have more than a single 2.5” SSD seems to be impossible as well. I’m open to ideas though. |
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The Lenovo m920x has dual nvme slots along with a PCIe 8 lane slot I believe the SSD slots are running off of a single lane   Lenovo ThinkCentre M920x Tiny Guide and Review with Mac Mini M1 Discussion The m720q has a single SSD but still has the SATA port but adds an 8-lane PCIe slot (half height/half length) and lots of STL are available for different NICs and "some" GPUs. There is a blank one out there the you can mod/drill to use for other options. (I use an m720q with a 4port i226-v NIC for use with OPNsense and I have a stack of them with 10g NICs for Proxmox (TrueNAS is running on a different box with 2x SSD + 4x HDD to handle iSCSI/CephFS/NFS) Booting VMs from 1G/2.5G is dog slow compared to 10G ... But your Ceph server better have some horsepower if starting up a whole bunch of VMs at once. |
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While spinning disks are still the $/TB king, it's possible to get great all-flash capacity and performance in 2u for the homelabber Used enterprise large-capacity SSDs especially in the newer EDSFF E1/E3L form-factor are starting to show up for decent prices I used to run a full rack with a ton of stuff but I downsized all my homelab gear over the past couple years A couple low-power ARM servers/nas and everything else to the cloud. Power bill significantly lower  |
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Originally Posted By stiglitz_actual: While spinning disks are still the $/TB king, it's possible to get great all-flash capacity and performance in 2u for the homelabber Used enterprise large-capacity SSDs especially in the newer EDSFF E1/E3L form-factor are starting to show up for decent prices I used to run a full rack with a ton of stuff but I downsized all my homelab gear over the past couple years A couple low-power ARM servers/nas and everything else to the cloud. Power bill significantly lower Downsizing from ancient gear = good Buying new SSDs in this market = BAD!!! The newer n305 based mini-ITX boards are pretty powerful, but dang ... its the cost of RAM and storage that is fugly as a MPLS honda driving Karen these days. |
I was kind of looking at these for Proxmox nodes.  
I was really hoping to just use local storage and ZFS replication for the Proxmox cluster though. |