These were originally built as a VSAN which I plan on replicating once I build a proper home vSphere environment. Each of the 740s have about 12TB raw in them but I’d like to load the 8 empty bays in each, anyone know where I can get a stack of cheap/used 1.8TB 2.5" SAS drives? I care more about capacity compared to speed as I plan on making the 440 a standalone all flash host.
Apart from gaining relevant experience using these “beefy” boys I can’t fathom why pple go for them.
A modern tiny/mini/micro PC, as Patrick Kennedy from ServeTheHome calls them, from the likes of Dell, Lenovo, Minisforums, ASRock, Beelink etc should outperform blades not only on compute but tasks that are now being offloaded such as encryption, media codecs etc
You could break even in 1-2 years on elecricity costs alone(depending where you are)!