Economy Home Server - Buy 'Renewed' Server Hardware vs Building a Ryzen Based Desktop in a Server Rackable Case?

[Drew-Dev]

Good Morning LTT Community!

I'm working on a home server setup and I was looking to get some advice. Some of the goals:

• Will serve as a Proxmox Node to host several VMs that will need 4 cores each 
• SSD (NVME Gen3 or Gen4) support with support for 4 NVME disks
• No need for advanced graphic processing
• Support for dual LAN 1gb or greater

I notice that there are a bunch of "renewed" servers on Amazon that are reasonably priced, albeit perhaps lower specs that what can be built around the same price point with desktop hardware.

Should I be considering these sorts of "renewed" servers or should I look at building out a server rackable desktop build?

[NelizMastr]

Older server gear comes with benefits and drawbacks.

 

Benefits are lower initial cost, proper server grade parts means good reliability.

When they are old enough to be plentiful yet new enough to be usable, parts are cheap too.

 

Drawbacks are typically noise, running-cost (power draw) and proprietary components.

NVMe won't be something you'll find on cheap used server gear, 2,5" SAS at best (compatible with SATA).

 

If you don't need remote management (iLO/iDRAC/IMM/other IPMI solutions) or ECC memory, you'll be

fine with a desktop platform I'd say. A 5900X would be a good fit for both efficiency and raw power.

[Drew-Dev]

4 minutes ago, NelizMastr said:

Older server gear comes with benefits and drawbacks.

 

Benefits are lower initial cost, proper server grade parts means good reliability.

When they are old enough to be plentiful yet new enough to be usable, parts are cheap too.

 

Drawbacks are typically noise, running-cost (power draw) and proprietary components.

NVMe won't be something you'll find on cheap used server gear, 2,5" SAS at best (compatible with SATA).

 

If you don't need remote management (iLO/iDRAC/IMM/other IPMI solutions) or ECC memory, you'll be

fine with a desktop platform I'd say. A 5900X would be a good fit for both efficiency and raw power.

I tend to lean towards the refurbed/renewed server hardware for the reasons you list.. also noise/power-draw not a major issue for me. 

Regarding storage, do servers generally have expansion for adding NVME via an additional board? Or do they just lack the PCIE interfaces?

[NelizMastr]

Just now, Drew-Dev said:

I tend to lean towards the refurbed/renewed server hardware for the reasons you list.. also noise/power-draw not a major issue for me. 

Regarding storage, do servers generally have expansion for adding NVME via an additional board? Or do they just lack the PCIE interfaces?

They have the lanes and, depending on the server, the slots, alright. But you'll need to use add-in cards. Front loading NVMe servers are quite expensive still and use the U.2 interface. You'll want a dual CPU server ideally. Something like a high clock speed Xeon E5 v3 or newer would be great.