Maybe others too, but B series for sure.
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Is your budget expandable and if so, by how much? Admittedly I know little about IT structures and parts availability in India, except in certain (large) cities it’s rather thriving, given the amount of callcenters, including scammers, based in India over the years.
There’s no real need to look away from DDR3 based systems, except noise and power consumption, but reliability is generally fine. And it’s cheaper then DDR4 systems.
For a (relatively) cheap entry into real, modern server hardware, consider the AMD EPYC based 3000 series SoC boards by Gigabyte and Asrock Rack. Not cheap, but they come with CPU, IPMI, tons of connectivity for storage and network, etc. You’d only need RAM (DDR4), PSU (300W will suffice) and case (cheap generic one, as long as it’s metal and has sufficient openings for cooling), optionally some extra fans to make air move inside. Salvaging a working PSU from an old generic PC (not Dell/HP/Lenovo/Acer) would lower your cost and should the case be ATX compatible, you’re almost done.
HTH!
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Those requirements are leading me to want to suggest an old optiplex on ebay or something like that.
If you can find something that you can throw 16GB of ram in, with like an i7-3700 or so, you’d have more than enough power in that thing.
a semi-bare model – no disk, yes CPU and maybe ram you might need to swap out – would probably run you about $200 on the 'bay.
EDIT: oh, you’re in India? I have no idea about price, but your used markets may or may not be great for this sort of thing.
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Sadly, yes. I’ll have to look around, but I might have to look for something new, even if it’s less powerful.
Unix Surplus’s eBay page has good sub $500.00 2U supermicro units with front facing hot swappable drive bays (they are basically listing them as TrueNAS started kits), But IDK if you want something bulky loud and normally meant to go in a rack. I just thought I would throw the option on the table, I’m using one in my set up. Also, IDK if you are planning to, avoid trying to shuck drives there is a lot of horror stories about that (just thought I would leave a work of warning).
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I would, but unfortunately they’re USA-centric. 
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Fellow Indian, i am using pi with a HDD mostly smartyfying my dumb tv . untill I can afford to get something better.
Just be active look for deals on on Indian gaming reddit forums and Facebook marketplace local listings. they are there but you have to keep looking. Go to the sellers home and check if stuffs working well.
Don’t take the deal if they ask you to meet at a public place unless you have some way to check the goods.
if you don’t find anything else cheaper then just build a Pc
I have seen used r5 1600 going for INR7000 ($90).
GPU: used 1050ti INR 8-9k ($100)
MobO: new b450m gigabyte ds3h or asrock pro4. INR 6-7k ($77-90 ) you could negotiate it down a little more if you find it used.
Ram: 8*2 16gb ddr4 Ram used or in smaller shops goes for INR 4000 for basic green stuff.
coolermaster or Deepcool 450w PSU
INR4000 ($52)
case : couldn’t find anything great. look into antec force or other older case with support for lots of Storage .
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Thanks for the recommendation.
Am planning to look around for all options, and since I’m living in Bengaluru, I have the option to look around at the SP Road Market, where there’s a good chance of getting much better deals than general retail.
The Raspberry Pi 4 is a really solid option, if you get the 8GB model, it’s an absolute monster. I’m actually using one of mine as a desktop for an experiment.
I would recommend you consider that route, the USB 3.0 interface on the Pi 4 is no longer shared bandwidth with the ethernet port, so network no longer slows down your disk. (assuming USB SSD)
Though, they are sold out everywhere I can find them in the US market. Not sure if India fares any better.
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If something in the tech space is sold out in USA, there’s a near zero chance to find it in India. Sadly so.
I did consider it and looked around for it a month ago. No luck.
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Ahh, good to know and sorry to hear. 
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Love your flair BTW.
Schematics or Die!
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haha thanks; I set it a while ago and I think I still stand by that position, though I understand that’s a bit overzealous.
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I don’t think it is! New York recently did pass legislation for mainstream tech and I hope that grows! Louis is awesome and he’s putting a lot of effort behind it!
Also… I stand with framework! I am happy with their schematic compromise. - YouTube
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If you just running a media server, why not use a raspberry pi?
It seems your not concerned about data integrity or storage expansion since you won’t be using it since it’s all cloud based.
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Oh, it’s not cloud based! Sorry if it came across that way! I just meant that I have a separate budget for the storage!
And I plan to run multiple services, and increase the storage throughout the tenure of the server! I plan to research RAID variations for redundancy too…
Grab a supermicro H8SGL and a ton of RAM off ebay. these have IPMI and 3 PCIE slots if you want to run additional HBAs or 10GB NICS.
yes it is old (ANCIENT?!?) but i am literally still using one as a FREENAS server and i was using one as a proxmox host until recently.
you can put a ton of cores and ram on them, still a viable server even today. especially for home labs.
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That really depends I used to have a x470 crosshair VII hero, it died. Replaced it with a b550 f gaming. It does totally do 4 sata + 2 nvme ssds, a graphics card and a capture card at the same time no problem. Im not aware that they turn off any sata ports ever. The main thing is that x570 has more pci 4.0. lanes and b550 will use pci 3.0. for a lot of things. You probably get more than enough expansion for most home server needs on b550.
The specific board I have seems to have shitty USB power delivery though. If I plug a dac directly into the board it sound really bad. Never experienced this, but I now understand why some audiophiles will always talk a lot about how important a good power supply is for your audio gear. I did get an external dac that has it’s own power supply and that fixed it. This probably would not be a problem if you don´t plan to power audio gear off of it.
My home server/nas contraption is still using a z97-A with 4790k. I mainly bought the crosshair vii hero because I assumed it would last a long time and AMD seemed to be supplying new cpus for it for a long time, so it might have made a good home server upgrade at some point. Guess more expensive does not always mean it will last any longer.
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For a home server you have pretty much 4 options; go pro (synology ett al), go old (used hw), go small (Raspberry Pi) or go new (DIY current gen). Best bang for buck is, strangely enough, to go new, followed by going with used hardware.
Here is a ~$400 new upgrade kit example. Highlights include 6 core / 12 thread CPU, 16 GB of memory, 250 GB NVMe system drive, 1 GB ethernet, Wifi.
Ryzen 5600G core build
| Type | Item | Price |
|---|---|---|
| CPU | AMD Ryzen 5 5600G 6 cores 12 threads | $163.74 |
| CPU Cooler | Noctua NH-L9a-AM4 | $44.95 |
| Motherboard | ASRock A520M-ITX/ac (Mini ITX) | $104.99 |
| Memory | TEAMGROUP T-FORCE VULCAN 2x8 GB 3200 MHz CL16 | $49.99 |
| Storage | Crucial P2 250 GB NVMe | $39.99 |
| Total | $403.66 |
Now, two limitations exist; only 4 SATA ports, and no case / PSU. The good news is a 250W PSU should be enough to feed this beast and 4x6 TB of storage only sets you back roughly $400, which means you should be able to stretch the budget to $600 total for a good 12-bay case with a 300W PSU.
Do not populate all bays at once! It is better to buy one to two 18 TB drives and scale from there.
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Damn, sotrage is getting cheap these days.
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