How would you upgrade workshop setup?

Networking
1

Ok, so I’ll be doing a bit of an upgrade of the PCs in my workshop and thought I’d challenge myself a little and use old gear to set up a little file server and boost chances of recovering from malfunctions (moba frying up etc).
Here’s the plan:

  1. File server would be getting old i5 with 8GB (might get 16 - but not 100% how all the other tweaks will pan out) of RAM. I want it to handle medium sized files (3d models) - not video footage size, but in extreme cases up to around 500MB. It would serve those to other 6 PCs in the workshop, sometimes to couple of them at a time. As the budget I have is tight I probably won’t get much in terms of available drives - I’d get a 3-4TB hdd (maybe two), plus 2-3 small SSDs from old machines. It will run Linux of course (probably OpenSUSE, maybe Fedora? - love both).

  2. On the regular desktops that get an upgrade I’d like to set a VMs with PCIe passthrough that would start on boot. The user would work in that VM without even knowing. The idea is that I can set up a host in a way that it would copy / backup file containing VM during the weekend to the file server (cronjobs + rsync). Also it should allow me to get system up and running in case of some sort of failure - I had this in the past and with Windows (sadly 2 PCs have to run Windows) I couldn’t simply put the drive into new machine. Had to reinstall everything - system, apps and so on. Not looking forward to it again.
    Those desktops will probably get new Ryzen chips (+Nvidia gpus, 500GB SSDs).

So I’d love to hear your opinions and thoughts on the matter:

  1. First of all - does it make sense at all? Is there some fundamental flaw in my thinking?
  2. Are there any essential parts I should get?
  3. How would you set filesystem on the storage server? Or when it comes to it - which filesystem? What can I do to increase speed?
  4. What would you recommend when it comes to setting up the network? Currently all the workstations are connected to the router (most through cat6 cable, the non3d ones through 802.11ac wifi) which also handles the internet. How should I approach it so when several machines access file on the server they throttle each other as few as possible? Or when it comes to it - in a way to minimize throttling when one machine is accessing file on a local network, while other is using internet?

I know it is a bit of a lot - but thought I’d ask as I’m not an expert on the matter and I don’t want to do some obvious mistakes :slight_smile: .