Originally Posted by
chx1975
That's an extremely good deal on a compact system, and as POS hardware it should be capable of running for a long while.
Dell has had some very good deals (around $400 with a Skylake Xeon, E3-1220v5 I think) on refurbished T130 servers via the outlet; not nearly as compact, but a great deal more expandable. Might be more appealing to some.
As for people praising NVMe: you will realize that in real life desktop usage NVMe provides next to none advantage to a SATA drive. Benchmarks, sure, but nothing that you'd actually feel.
In my experiece NVMe makes a big difference in a limited range of development tasks; indexing or searching a huge number of files is much faster, and "find me all the instances other teams have used a piece of my code" IS a day to day task.
In server use, the IOPS make a much bigger difference than the sequential throughput, and for CI or mail or DB servers, it can be a game changer (although it's wicked expensive there.)
For a home server, well, it's not that much more expensive although I'd have spent the difference on capacity instead. My home server is still mostly disks (60TB raw disk with 45TiB usable; 2.56TB SSD with 1.2TiB usable.) One of these days, I'll probably rebuild it with SSD cache in front of the disks, but in the short run it does just fine with the OS and a few other performance-sensitive bits on the SSDs and all the media and backup files on spinning rust.