> For 8+ bays you just need a SAS HBA card and one free PCI-E slot. Not to mention that many motherboards will have 6+ SATA ports already.
And what case are you putting them into? What if you want it rack mounted? What about >1gig networking? What if I want a GPU in there to do whisper for home assistant?
Used gaming rigs are great. But used servers also still have loads of value, too. Compute just isn't one of them.
A rackmount case from Rosewill costs a couple of hundred bucks or so, new. And they'll remain useful for as long as things like ATX boards and 3.5" hard drives are useful.
I mean: An ATX case can be paid for once, and then be used for decades. (I'm writing this using a modern desktop computer with an ATX case that I bought in 2008.)
PCI Express lanes can be multiplied. There should frankly be more of this going on than there is, but it's still a thing that can be done.
Consumer boards built on the AMD X670E chipset, for instance, have some switching magic built in. There's enough direct CPU-connected lanes for an x16 GPU and a couple of x4 NVMe drives, and the NIC(s) and/or HBA(s) can go downstream of the chipset.
(Yeah, sure: It's limited to an aggregate 64 Gbps at the tail end, but that's not a problem for the things I do at home where my sights are set on 10Gbps networking and an HBA with a bunch of spinny disks. Your needs may differ.)
And what case are you putting them into? What if you want it rack mounted? What about >1gig networking? What if I want a GPU in there to do whisper for home assistant?
Used gaming rigs are great. But used servers also still have loads of value, too. Compute just isn't one of them.