Absolutely this. No need to run enterprise level hardware at home. You can easily run a huge environment with 128gb of ram and an 8-core Ryzen processor. If you want to get crazy you could even get an Epyc CPU with a SuperMicro motherboard, put it into a eATX whitebox case and run silent fans with a huge heatsink and still barely use any power. You can even run all the networking OS's in VM's, either with PFSense or some other vm template or use GNS3. No need to purchase a ton of hardware.
It really makes no sense to me why people drop all this money on R710's and make their house sound like the Hartsfield-Jackson Delta Terminal.
Do you have more details on this? I've been looking for a way to build a fanless server but I've been having a difficult time finding info on it. The only stuff I can find is one or two commercial sites that sell custom builds, and so I wonder if it's difficult to do on one's own, or if the fanless tech is still very niche and undeveloped
You could go with an intel Nuc, though they use mobile CPU's you can still get a lot of performance out of it, at least considering the form factor. If you want more power you need fans though, try the Noctua fans, they are close to quite. There's really no point going fanless.
What about the benefit of using ECC RAM for a file server? I don't see that available in consumer grade H/W. (As far as network H/W I'm in full agreement.)
If you plan on running a ZFS file server at home, which enthusiasts prefer because it's one of the only filesystems that supports full file checksumming to prevent bit rot.
Anyway, the ZFS approach is to inherently trust the data that's in RAM over the data on the drive if there's a discrepancy, so ECC RAM is required to maintain the integrity of data on RAM.
All filesystems inherently trust the data that is in RAM. There's nothing any piece of software can reasonably do about memory it can't trust. It's therefore a good idea to run ECC RAM, regardless of which filesystem you run. You can be running your filesystem on Ext4 or the legacy BSD Unix File System, and it would still be a good idea to use ECC.
That ZFS needs ECC moreso than other filesystems is an often repeated misconception. It's just that ZFS (and e.g. Btrfs) is often run on file servers, on which ECC is recommended.
> the ZFS approach is to inherently trust the data that's in RAM over the data on the drive if there's a discrepancy, so ECC RAM is required to maintain the integrity of data on RAM.
This is absurd. Please read up (and understand) this before talking about it again. The benefits of ZFS and the benefits of ECC are orthogonal, though if your fileserver has both, it's a pretty darn robust system with respect to integrity -- assuming that (for example) the disk controllers don't lie about something being synced.
Absolutely this. No need to run enterprise level hardware at home. You can easily run a huge environment with 128gb of ram and an 8-core Ryzen processor. If you want to get crazy you could even get an Epyc CPU with a SuperMicro motherboard, put it into a eATX whitebox case and run silent fans with a huge heatsink and still barely use any power. You can even run all the networking OS's in VM's, either with PFSense or some other vm template or use GNS3. No need to purchase a ton of hardware.
It really makes no sense to me why people drop all this money on R710's and make their house sound like the Hartsfield-Jackson Delta Terminal.