Oh, so the spec is fairly correct at 97W idle.
And being an old, slow CPU means it’s not efficient at load either (higher peak consumption & longer precising time needed).

Are 22TB Exos derives around 400+ monies (double the price from a year ago)? 6TB are only half that? Idk even where to look for prices bcs stock is weird. Red Plus (not Pro, which are loud) have similar prices.

Yeah, these are dark times, evey gen things get worse instead of advancements ppl can use.

Still, keep in mind that those “wonderful” SAS drives are slow & might have been in operation for 12 years.

But I see your point & don’t really have any advice for you.

… if this link is correct, the idle power consumption (before HDDs, redundant PSU, cards, on a single CPU?) is … 97 watts …
(I mentioned the bill, heat, and noise before tho. I’m trying to say that that “idle” is prob the same as ‘the difference between that server and a PC with two HDDs’. About 876 kWh annually. It depends on your circumstances how much monies per year difference that is.)

Imhe servers are rarely under-priced.

Yeah, same.

I don’t know which version this 2620 is (they’ve been around since 2012), but any modern consumer CPU can outpace it by an order of magnitude - tho with fewer PCIe lanes (& possibly memory throughput, but not sure, maybe not), but it doesn’t sound like you need them.

Also idling makes quite a lot of difference even with cheap electricity bcs it’s 24/7 (eg 20 or 40 monies more a month on a rig that costs 200 monies either way is perhaps worth considering). Those “old” servers didn’t really power down much (CPU voltage + other parts, like server mobos, generally consume more power).

Also2, if important, making a quiet server is harder than making a quiet “PC server”.

Additionally to consider whatever the pro admin (closed sauce) tools the server has.

And this is just me, but I also don’t need RAID for my use case (and drive prices), for the same price as one HDD (a few years back that is) I would rather add that drive in an additional separate server/PC & have a backup system instead of just a backup drive (and it can be in a remote location in case of other emergencies/damages, like fire or whatever).

Old servers always seemed cheap but after thinking about it & the alternatives they’ve always seemed just fairly priced at the end. Which makes sense since it’s not noobs selling them, nor are they on fire sales/liquidation prices (they are sold by intermediaries in those cases).

So an old consumer PC (top of the line of the era if you like, or one of those corpo prebuilt machines), a good drive, and a good (efficient & safe) PSU is my usual homelab recommendation unless it wouldn’t cover very specific use cases).

Just for fun ballpark info:
- a 2620 (a hexacore from 2012) has a geekbench score of 390 (Single-Core Score) & 1902 (Multi-Core Score),
- an i3 12th gen (a classic quadcore from 2022 with a fraction of the power/heat, twice the max memory bandwidth) has 2147 (Single-Core Score) & 6766 (Multi-Core Score).

Second for Tumbleweed!!
The low-to-nothing maintenance rolling release (in my experience). I recommend it if you have to maintain computers of family & friends (no more release upgrades, out of the box snapshots, etc).

It’s so friendly & hard to break (for a normal person).

I know opinions vary, but I also love zypper.