Just know that higher RPM doesn’t necessarily mean higher noise. In my experience Helium filled drives can be pretty quiet, and basically all really high capacity drives are helium filled.

I have an arm of shucked WD drives and while I can hear them from time to time, they’re not bad. Also your case makes a huge difference. Make sure the drives are on rubber isolators, and what they’re mounted on can’t vibrate to make any noise. The only noise I hear from these drives is when they first spin up after being idled.

Is 5640 RPM acceptable? WD reds are all about 5400rpm and are basically the gold standard for NAS HDDs.

You can shuck them out of WD easy store drives sold at best buy. They’re white label drives from WD, but they’re all based on the red/red pro drives.

If you already have a server and don’t need more resources then just leave it. No need to waste more power “just because”.

That said you could hang onto it until you have a need. You never know when a machine will shit the bed and having a half top is useful.

What software are you planning on running? The N100 is a pretty stout chip for my router. Not all file systems need insane amounts of ram like ZFS

That said you may want a full sized pcie slot depending on what hard drives you’re running. At work our raid controllers are gimped by their PCIe interface. Even with regular ass hard drives they will out pace pcie 2.0@x1 speeds since most cheap HBAs are PCIe 2 or maybe 3.

If you’re buying a VPS why not host the website there?

What OS are you planning on running? I personally use FreeNAS(TrueNAS) and largely love it. There’s a steep initial learning curve, but it’s not too high.

I run it in a VM inside of esxi so I don’t need a lot of it’s more advanced features. But I do have a jail with deluge in it to handle my torrents. Deluge isn’t up to the task though so I may migrate to a separate VM with something else, or just make a new jail with a different client.

What if you really hate support and ease of finding images online?

With that tight of a budget I wouldn’t hold your breath.

Something like coreboot is incredibly niche for someone to care about. Newer device like above will be costly because of economies of scale. And for something on a hobbyist level to take off it would need to be at least a few years old + the right person getting the bug up their ass to make it work (well).

I had a W540 until the end of 2021 and besides it crashing from a hardware issue it was plenty fast for me at the time. As long as you’re not doing too intensive work it’s probably plenty as long as you’ve got the full power 45 watt quad core i7s.

Also SSDs don’t even need to be mounted. You can just leave it flapping in the breeze until you get something set up. As long as it’s not literally flapping in the breeze and hitting things it’s probably fine.

I use a “regular” desktop as my server. It uses much less power than most servers and still has plenty of horsepower for what I do.

Remote management and (cheap) ECC ram are the biggest reason to get a server. But those usually aren’t issues for most work loads, especially at home.

Shit I used to run my stuff off of a laptop with maxed out ram, and some people just have a raspberry pi and call it a day.

You’d need a card capable of 2.5 gig and I haven’t been able to find one of those either.

My friend did find these which should work. I think I have a spare 2.5 gig nic somewhere that I could install into my server. I’ll have to do pcie pass through straight to pfsense since ESXi doesn’t support this el cheapo consumer grade nic. But it should work.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C4JKSFW6

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C871SQVQ