[sdenton4]

Ha. My home server for a very long time was a RPi 3B+. Totally fine for all kinds of background home server-y tasks, including running a local jupyter server for one-off calculations. (When I need a lot of cpu for something, I probably need a beefy gpu, which is a whole other beast.)

Power supply: It's USB powered. For a home server, I find it convenient to plug it into a USB port on the router, to which it is also connected for ethernet.

SDCard: It was set up to only use the sdcard to boot and use a USB stick as root, which gets around all of the sdcard issues. This is not a totally plug-and-play experience, though. My understanding is that the newer firmwares finally allow direct boot from USB, though.

Case: You can DIY it easily. The case for my home server was basically a folded piece of cardstock on which I drew a picture of a once-bitten pear. Other times I've used legos or dremel tooled altoid tins.

Heat sink: Unnecessary prior to the Pi4. (which also ramped up the cpu and power usage quite a bit...) They keep producing the older models, so it's mainly a matter of picking where you want to live on the compute vs heat management scale.