Deals on PowerEdge T440, worth it for Freenas build ?

[kriegalex]

TLDR : 8 core Xeon Silver 4110 with 8 HDD bays, PERC H330, selling for ~$1100 instead of ~$1700. Memory and HDD to be bought separately. Planned use : mainly Plex (4K HEVC transcoding possible) and media storage.

It is popular for homelabs to buy old gen servers to maximize the cost effectiveness of a setup, but in this case I just saw some deals on recent Dell Hardware. Some T440 PowerEdge are currently discounted on a local e-shop:

• Xeon Silver 4110, 8GB DDR4, upgradable up to 512GB
• 8x 3.5'', PERC H330, comes with 1 HDD
• ~$1100 down from $1700 (~35%). The CPU alone is worth $550 here.

This seems to me like a pretty good candidate for my next FreeNAS build (probably even overkill), as I wanted to avoid rackmounted solutions. Also RAM prices are supposed to keep going down (weak point of this unit). Chipset LGA 3647 also provides pretty good upgrade path in the future (Silver -> Gold -> Platinum, bought used on eBay). I would also expect that the noise and airflow of this kind of tower is way better than a DIY solution, because everything from Dell is custom made. With the discount, the price becomes competitive with DIY, but not with old gen stuff. It seems that old gen tower server units are also harder to find than old gen rackmounted servers (R510, R710, DL380, ...).

The final unit may look like this :

• 2x 8TB RAID 1, buffer vdev
• 6x 8TB RAIDZ2, media vdev
• 8x8GB DDR4 RAM (or even 8x16 if prices are really going down)

The CPU may be put to use for a Plex server with possible 4K HEVC transcoding. Otherwise, it would be pretty overkill I guess, as the server would not be under heavy load (home usage, not office).