Endeavour1988

Hi all, with the dreaded your bills are going up as always come January, I've been looking at an old workstation to purpose as a all in one server. Mainly storage, VM's and my play thing, which has led me to something like a Dell T5600 or HP Z640, some offering 2x Xeon's for little price difference.

Does anyone know how hungry these are on power during low use compared to a modern Ryzen system?

I'm looking to grab a 3.5" Extremal drive ideally atleast a 6TB but 8TB would be ideal to back be sort of a hot backup and plugged into a laptop a fair amount. Any recommendations?

I keep looking at these G drives and reformatting it for Windows, well reviewed is there anything special about them? I read they normally use Ultrastar disks? I did look at the two WD style drives too, then I also considered a single enclosure and using my own purchased disk.

What do you think is the best option for long term storage and reliability, I'm always skeptical of these unknown enclosures and what the actual hardware is and can it sustain writing large quantities of files without powering down.

I have a spare PC, i5 7th gen, 16gb Ram and 500gb SSD with a 2TB hard drive. I fancied purposing for a storage server, all my other devices around the house are Windows, should I just pop on Windows 11 Pro, or are there any benefits to going for a flavour of Linux? I would maybe like to play around with a VM or two as well.

I also have a limitation that this needs to be wireless (for now) can I still assign a dedicated local IP addresses to the host and various VM's? I'd also welcome some suggestion for me to dabble in or guides :-)