ShadowChaser

I am smitten with a specific supermicro board that has the Xeon D-1521. It's an embedded Broadwell (intel 5th gen) Xeon that has a TDP of 45W, which is higher than I'd like, but has dual 10GbE onboard. Official ECC memory support and the ability to add 4 PCIe devices with bifurcation means this is a pretty good start for a full size build in my opinion. There's a modern alternative in the Minisforum BD790i series that uses a 7940HX or 7945HX with a configurable TDP of 55-75W if you need extra cpu horsepower If you want to go smaller and sacrifice some expansion in the name of efficiency I think the best bet is to go with a board that uses a mobile chipset and use the M.2 slot like @Manderis has said. Or using the M4 Mac Mini with Thunderbolt expansion... though I suspect at that point you may be putting more power into your drives than the CPU/SoC if you have more than a few HDDs. So you may have to consider denser drives that are more expensive whose ROI could be measured in decades rather than years.

What sort of Optiplex? The mid and full tower versions should use regular ATX power supplies in which case you can replace the Dell OEM one with something that has more peripheral power should you need it. I would say that if you are serious about adding additional drives to get a desktop case that can support the drives you need. If you're only running a handful then using adapters should be okay.

for your case specifically I think the GPU needs to go. A more modern nvidia gpu would be both more efficient and do better with transcoding. If you're not doing that serverside then maybe no gpu at all for a more efficient build? I used to run my servers on outdated hardware because they were cheap and plentiful but the electricity costs for me meant a newer and more efficient (albeit more expensive) system would reach breakeven after a few years. Also, newer doesn't mean new - intel 8th gen and nvidia 10-series are both around 7 years old and would be significantly faster at equivalent or lower power draw.

Trialing this on a spare parts all SSD NAS using leftover components from when I consolidated my bulk storage file server with my flash storage media server. I would like to eventually use this server in conjunction with my bulk storage server currently running TrueNAS. The plan is to keep that one as a no frills TrueNAS box with all the spinning rust while this handles the applications and containers that I hate dealing with on a stock TrueNAS system. For reference, I've pulled together the following hardware to try HexOS with: Gigabyte MB10-datto (Xeon D-1521), 32GB DDR4-2666 16GB Sata DOM for boot media, 4x2TB MP34 as storage using a QNAP qm2-4p-384 add in card All of this is living in a Fractal Node 202 which I can stash just about anywhere due to the form factor. Initial installation took 3 minutes from selecting boot media to restart. Very smooth, very streamlined, was essentially just like a TrueNAS install First boot + setup got hung up due to a pcie bus error, had to force a reboot about 10 minutes in 2nd try took about 5 minutes to get to the splash screen on device with an error stating the web interface could not be accessed and to check the network configuration 3rd try I used a 1GbE dongle instead of the onboard 10GbE as a sanity check and was able to establish a connection. Adopting the server through the web interface was very easy. All my hardware was detected as expected. And 2 minutes later I'm on the dashboard with the server in good health and a fresh 6TB pool. At this point I switched over to my proper 10GbE switch and voila, it works perfectly. The main draw to HexOS for me is the one-click deploy of apps and programs - I decided to try out Immich first and see if I can potentially reduce my dependence on Google Photos. It installs with one click, no hassle whatsoever, and I can launch into its web config immediately. From my desktop I was able to upload a photo. I took that as a good sign. I was able to link it to my mobile phone and see the photo I uploaded, but could not upload anything from my phone to the server. I needed to restart the backend and regrant all permissions on my phone before I was able to start a backup. This is as close to an "anyone can do it" implementation and I'm pleased with how it all works out! Now that isn't to say that software issues haven't been encountered - after setting up Immich I wanted to return to the dashboard only to be greeted by a "this server is not available" message. This is odd considering that the local IP still works fine for accessing the TrueNAS login and Immich. So I suppose it really is just a nice wrapper for someone like me who can't be bothered to spend a weekend configuring things on the software side. That's fine by me - I prefer to play with the hardware anyway, then leave the software as a set and forget type of deal to the pros. And in the time it took me to write up this post, the dashboard returned. Hooray! No clue what changed or what happened, but I'll post that little hiccup in support and see if there's anything that can be done about it. The experience so far isn't perfect. I don't know what the difference is between HexOS and TrueNAS in terms of installation with regards to the hardware but I've never needed to retry a TrueNAS install at any stage in the process. Hopefully my experience is just a fluke, because the ease of use on the software side is simply a breath of fresh air. Troubleshooting software makes me want to rip my hair out and I'm hoping that all supported applications will be a simple one-click install. I'm excited to see where this goes!