On Thu, Aug 25, 2022 at 4:59 PM Dale <rdalek1...@gmail.com> wrote: <SNIP> > I may do some mobo hunting shortly. See what little thing I can buy > that is powerful enough. I don't think a Raspberry Pi is enough. It > gets close tho. Biggest thing, I'd need a lot of SATA ports. LOTS of > them.
Granted, I had a couple of old cases which lowered the cost but I went to a local computer store and bought used motherboards that came with processors and memory. They were both Core i7 but I paid only about $75 each. I needed power supplies and hard drives so each machine ended up around $350 or so by the time I was done. Each has 2 4TB drives for storage and a 1TB drive for the OS. A lot of used motherboards have on-board VGA and Gb/S networking. These are TrueNAS machines, FreeBSD not Linux, but they have a Linux version now if that makes you more comfortable. I'd stick with AMD64 as it's better tested and I don't think you'll get the network throughput you need to be fast with a Raspberry Pi
