alt Hacker NewsUntil about 6 years ago I also mostly used ex-server "ewaste" hardware, because it's always been cheaper, except for electricity use which I wasn't paying for myself. My desktop in ~2015 was built from 2006-era hardware, with 32GB of ECC DDR2, which felt like a lot at the time.
My "6 years ago" build was with more typical current-gen consumer-grade hardware, because at that point I was on the hook for the electricity bill. I haven't thought about what my next build will look like because it's still going strong (aside from a flakey DIMM... so my next system will have ECC).
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I've been extremely pleased with my R320 in a NAS role. Idles at 40 watts, is quiet, has ECC, and the drives stay cool.
Maybe that's still too much power for some people, but I'm happy with the tradeoffs.
My homeserver is essentially a top of line gaming PC from 2012 with a Quadro RTX 4000 from 2018. It was not top of the line in 2013 when I bought everything on sale but after many inexpensive ebay upgrades, it's now what I wish I could have afforded back then. Most of the time, it's perfectly fine since it's main job is jellyfin. I'm sure I could be saving some electricity with newer hardware but with the current market, it's just not worth it. I'm missing AVX2 support which Claude Code has recently made a requirement but now I just have Claude ssh into it from another PC that is a few years newer.