I just buy refurbished spinners that are enterprise.

Exos. Ultrastars usually. I’ve had not problems and they are cheap as chips.

My server runs a LOT of things. Including numerous crypto nodes. So it is not a total loss.

Plus I do love all the room for activities and use it constantly for making videos on YouTube.

I forgot there is also a gtx 1650 in there as well.

But honestly. I’m fairly sure the majority of the power draw is the 4 CPU’s.

96 cores and 192 threads on older architectures was a bit of a power suck. If I had it all to do over again I would for sure have gotten an epyc chip instead.

I have an r930.

With 4x e7-8890 v4’s. 9ssd’s 2x SAS drives 4x m.2 drives on a pcie card 512gb of ram across 32 ram sticks

Pulls about 400w like all the time even at idle.

You can usually find good rack mount servers used on like eBay for cheap. I’ve gotten two over the years. Both were good and still running to this day.

Usually you can pick them up at almost any price range. But they tend to start around $500 or so. And they are normal x86 processors usually older xeons. And then with that you can run something like proxmox. And get a decent number of cores.

Or. Alternatively. You can also pick up a tiny mini pc with like a ryzen chip that might have like 8 cores and 16 threads for only like $300 or so. I use one of these as my daughters computer and I am endlessly impressed. Like no power draw. Basically silent. And overall very inexpensive.

Raspberry pie are great. But the arm architecture can present challenges sometimes.

Made an entire video about how to do this with your pihole and unbound.

https://youtu.be/D2Z87W7Znr8?si=RASe65epZ7BPcbee

I have used a bunch of these types of drives without issue. Usually I get ultra star or the hgst ones. I have them in several servers and a NAS. You can’t beat the price. And for me. I would not have any big concerns with using these. If you get one with some type of problem just make sure to return it within the window.