How small? How many drives? I bought several used Lenovo P330 E2276G for my servers.
The Intel CPU has great low power GPU for video encoding/decoding for video streaming.
The Xeon ECC ram gives long term reliability. It’s important if you leave your PC on 24/7 for years at a time.
Smaller doesn’t need to be more complex. 3.5" drives weren’t more complex than 5.25" drives.
A smaller head means a smaller drive actuator. Less mass and smaller size means it can compensate much quicker in response to vibration detection.
Back when full height 5.25" drives were the norm, you couldn’t pick up your PC while running without causing an error. Those tiny CF card sized drives failed but took extreme abuse compared to big drives.
Ssd for boot but not cost effective for nas. Nor do I trust their longevity.
Smaller stuff has smaller mass and therefore can be more reliable.
There were portable mp3 players with mechanical hard drives that were reliable despite extreme abuse.
I’ve read there is an id pin on Epyc cpus that differentiates them from Ryzen. Der8aur made it work by masking the pin on the socket.
The AsRock says ECC but not verified with Ryzen.
So you end up having to test it yourself like this guy and hope the version hasn’t changed between when he bought the motherboard and now.
Could be but finding a motherboard that has verified ECC is tricky. Most say works but not tested/supported so you’re on your own to figure out if ECC fully works.
Plex, Blue Iris, Minecraft mod servers for the kids. I’ll often use the server CPU for video filtering/encoding home videos off of VHS tapes because the nnedi3 filter takes a lot of CPU.
Years ago I lost data on a nas because the ram wasn’t ECC. So I won’t buy/build any PC without ECC unless it’s only going to be used for web browsing/gaming.
This is really nice for home servers. There has been a huge gap for years where the choice was a 16-64 core high watt monstrosity or use a 4 year old server CPU before every server went to high core counts.
8cores with ecc is perfect for my home use.
My Helium 7200 drives run cooler and quieter than my old 5400’s.
If I remember correctly, every watt is around $1 a year. So a 100 watt server costs $100 a year every year to run. 12 SAS drives and the server is going to be expensive to keep running.
Used servers/workstations are likely more reliable than new consumer.
They were very likely kept temperature controlled, have ECC, and are actually known working instead of something like Asus. If I remember correctly, PC mortality is very high the first 6 months, goes down to near zero for 5 years, then starts going back up.
Replace the SSD/hard drive and you are good. You might not even have to do that. I checked the stats on the SSD that came with my used Lenovo workstation and it had like 20 hours on it.