I am currently serving a photoprism instance for my self and the wife. I want to expand to have everyone’s home folder on the server. So we would have 5 home folders, all lunuxes. Anyway so I’m looking at some old servers that actually look pretty good.
HPE Proliant DL360 Gen9
I’ve been comparing it with other servers and it seems to be the easiest to use for the semi intrepid admin wannabe that I am. Is there anything better in the sub $300 range?
As someone who has owned enterprise servers for self-hosting, I agree with the previous comment that you should avoid owning one if you can. They might be cheap, but your longterm ownership costs are going to be higher. That’s because as the server breaks down, you’ll be competing with other people for a dwindling supply of compatible parts. Unlike consumer PCs, server hardware is incredibly vendor locked. Hell, my last Proliant would keep the fans ramped at 100% because I installed a HDD that the BIOS didn’t like. This was after I spent weeks tracking down a disk that would at least be recognized, and the only drives I could find were already heavily used.
My latest server is built with consumer parts fit into a 2U rack case, and I sleep so much easier knowing I can replace any of the parts myself with brand new alternatives.
Plus as others have said, a 1U can be really loud. I don’t care about the sound of my gaming computer, but that poweredge was so obnoxious that despite being in the basement, I had to smother it with blankets just so the fans didn’t annoy me when I was watching TV upstairs. I still have a 1U Dell Poweredge, but I specifically sought out the generation that still let you hack the fan speeds in IPMI. From all my research, no such hack exists for the Proliant line.