| Separately from what others are saying about used equipment being very inexpensive, which is all very true, I have a different take on why I do it. I'm a gamer and upgrade my primary gaming machine on a much tighter cycle than a lot of other people, which means I have a fair bit of hand-me-down hardware around to pass along. Sometimes, instead of just selling/trading/giving my old stuff away, I'll stick the consumer-grade stuff inside my 4U rack boxes. Basically, it comes down to customizability and the space to do what I want in it. For example, my NAS server's case has 18 drive bays. With modern motherboards supporting NVMe, it's very doable to run the OS off NVMe, a couple of caching SSDs and an array that is 20TB+ large, and bonded 2.5GBe (maybe upgrading to 10 someday) to my VM Host machine. Most out of the box NAS systems don't do that. My other server I use for hosting VMs and cracking hashes (not crypto, think password cracking) and has a few older GPUs in it to accelerate that task. Nowadays a lot of consumer-grade CPUs have as many or more cores than older second hand server equipment, and often can run lower power (not always true). Plus putting it into 4U boxes means I can more larger fans so it's quieter than traditional aircraft-engine servers. This is by some people's definition "doing it wrong" because I don't have ECC memory, etc., but the reality is I've been running it for years now and it's been very stable, with only one hardware failure over the course of the decade or so I've had this system together. |
So you use consumer CPUs in rackmount hardware? Are you able to use any consumer PC components in a rackmount rig? I'd love to build a home server and I can see the benefit to better ventilation/noise result with rackmount, and I imagine rackmount uses the same hard drives, but are other PC parts equally usable?