I have an r510 I have been using as a Nas. Recently the storage drives started dying. I only had 2 so nbd, but I’m now thinking about other ways to do this.
I think I want to use a different machine. I have a paycheck coming up, what sort of office pc could I get to do this? I want Rebar to do stuff with a server gpu I have, and I would like it to be vm capable. Would a i5 6500 be enough to run storage and a few we services? Maybe one Linux vm for pihole and whatever else?
Probably. Storage itself doesn’t need any noticeable amount of CPU unless you use compression. 6500 is pretty old gear at this point, not even having HT but seems like at least VT-x/d is enabled. But I would be careful with VMs and services that use more CPU than your typical background noise service. Memory might become the more pressing concern depending on what is running.
4 cores for pure storage will be fine unless you send GBs of compressed stuff per second. Entry-level Commercial NAS ship with 2-4 core Atom/Celeron all the time.
I run a i5-6500 as 12-disc NAS. I used to run a few container services on it, before it got relegated to backup duty. zfs receive jobs bottleneck on the ssh process decrypting the stream at around 750MB/s.