They support NVMe and have a PCIE riser; if you get the little adapter from Lenovo’s proprietary slot to standard PCIE, you can run it as a nic, or get an HBA with external SFF-8008 ports and then find a cheap enclosure to use as a custom DAS solution.

I would recommend:

• go on eBay and find some sort of cheap Lenovo/dell/hp thin client for your secondary node. You can find workable 1L-class boxes for around $100. You can get away with some of the older m700/710/900/910 tiny models, but the extensibility of the m720/920 tiny models is going to be much better.
• for your primary, I think you’d probably be best off finding an old server tower with 8 3.5” bays - if you’re lucky and on-the-ball, you may be able to snipe something like this, but shipping is of course going to be a bitch. An alternative is to pick up another one of those thin clients (making sure it’s a model with USB3, but preferably 3.1 or 3.2 whatever the gen is (side note: fuck anyone involved with the USB versioning scheme, because it’s absolutely indecipherable) that can actually support meaningful data transfer, and then just find a cheap DAS and connect it to that node.

Some foundational questions:

• budget?
• rough desired capacity?
• desired level of resiliency?

Yeah that’s called the *arr suite

Just get an old 1L class dell/hp/lenovo, a riser to adapt the proprietary expansion slot to standard PCIe, and an old x520DA2 nic. You can find all of this on eBay. Then, just slap pfSense or OPNSense or whatever you want on it.

Source: running an old Lenovo m920q with that exact setup. 2.5G copper module to the modem, fiber to the SFP+ port on my switch. Works great.

Edit: and the switch is the 9-port version of the one you posted.

I suppose it’s a personal choice of where you set the bar for your systems.

Personally, as a software engineer who’s designed and built a lot of systems over the course of my career: nope - not if you want to just set it and forget it, that is. Which I do. And yes, most of the systems I’ve built professionally aren’t to that standard (mostly due to time constraints), which has consistently frustrated me, but you gotta be a little bit zen about stuff you don’t have complete ownership over.

Maybe your tolerance for manual intervention is higher than mine, but in terms personal standards, I don’t consider a system to be “done” until it’s configured to to handle itself resiliently and recoverably in all but the most catastrophic situations (I.e. basically, a hardware fault, or some sort of fairly serious upstream infrastructure failure).

All that said: YMMV. It’s a personal preference, and I know my standards would be considered abnormally strict by some.

lol that second one is a terrible idea

Holy shit dude. You can take like a quarter of that and make an absolutely silly system, and make a decent chunk of change selling the rest.

Lmao dude thats simply not happening at that price.

You could get part of the way there with an old Dell server, but you’re probably gonna be paying closer to 2-300 for a decently spec’d one like you’re describing. You’re probably gonna be looking at a 10 year old twin quad core setup with a tdp of like 500W combined for JUST the cores. Your power bill is going to murder your budget, even if you somehow find a magical deal on the box.

I mean, they made piracy WAY easier to understand than how to legally watch all the seasons of pokemon in order, so I’m really just not feeling any sympathy for streaming companies whatsoever

Yeah you just get a pirated copy

Whatever you end up doing, make sure you don’t leave out the ARRRRRs

“Reasons”

I will be driving my 03 1.8t 5mt Jetta into the ground, thank you very much.

This belongs on /c/nottheonion

Ok, let’s say that’s true. Which of the alternatives do you genuinely think are better?

It is 100% a great idea to see how you feel about the concept of self-hosting with an old machine. If it’s really old (and I’m talking like anything from before about 2008-2010), perhaps consider snagging an old “tiny”/1L-class box from eBay for cheap. Dell, HP, and Lenovo units can be found for WAY under $100 all the time, and slightly more modern units can still be had at a reasonable price, depending on the model. They’re great platforms to play around with. Just shove a cheap SSD in there and play with it.

Source: an old m920q with an i5-8500T is running pfSense for my home network

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Outstanding. Truly, marvelous.

Time for a repo fork?