I dusted off my RPI4 and started tinkering with self-hosting things and it’s sparked a fire. Suddenly I have 7 docker containers running and I need more RAM, more space and I want something reliable with room to grow. I like small form factors but it doesn’t need to be RPI small. Any recs for your favorite hardware under $500?
I am still quite happy with my old Sun Fire X2270 M2 with Dual Xeon X5675. Not new, but its 12 physical cores, 88 GB RAM and 4 hotswap SATA drive bays in a 1U rack unit make it quite a decent machine for running a couple of VMs.
I also like my Dell T320 Rackable Tower server. It has room for 8 hotswap 3.5" SAS drives (or 16 2.5"), redundant power supply, and you should be able to get it for under $300. With a Xeon E5-1428L V2, mine is still quite capable and uses between 140 and 160 W (with 8 disks).
Wow, that’s a ton of computing power for the money.