Inexpensive turnkey server hardware?

[danb35]

I haven't been in the market for a while, but now I'm looking to put together a small TrueNAS box which won't be used for much more than SMB storage. A few years ago, there were options from Dell, Lenovo, and HPE for inexpensive, new, low-end servers--the deal I remember best is the HPE Proliant ML10 for under US$200 with an i3 and some RAM. I'm not seeing a whole lot like this on the market these days--what's the current best deal for something like this? I'm in .us; I could bring in from outside of the country if that would give a better deal, but I'd be somewhat surprised if that were the case.

 

[Jailer]

Not interested in the ebay used server market? I got a pretty good single socket 2011 system for not much cash to play around with esxi.

 

[danb35]

Not interested in the ebay used server market?

I wouldn't greatly mind used, though something brand new, with ECC-supporting CPU, for under $200 (which was the deal on the ML10 I remember), would be nice. But definitely not looking for something in Socket 2011; don't want to burn that many watts. It turns out, though, the $300 TS140 with an E3 is still out there, albeit used from eBay. And while I don't see a $200 ML10, I see one currently at $255--though that's a seller with very minimal feedback.

 

[danb35]

How time flies. I finally decided to move ahead with this, and found a TS140 w/ Xeon and a decent amount of RAM, but the $100 shipping pushed me away from that. Ended up pulling the trigger on a HPE MicroServer Gen8, also with a Xeon. It looks like it's possible to put a SSD in the ODD space, but not possible to boot from it without odd machinations, so I'll probably use a USB SSD as a boot device.

Now for drives that aren't stupidly expensive...

 

[danb35]

The Microserver arrived today, and seems like a nice little box. I was able to upgrade the iLO firmware to the latest version, and now have a HTML virtual console (yay, no Java garbage needed!), but only until POST finishes (stupid licensing restrictions). But even then, I can see the console remotely, and that's good for a bit. The E3-1220L is hardly a powerhouse, but it should be plenty for what I need it for.