i had no idea what i was looking for. hit the reddit subs, googled, questioned ai sources. many things pointed me to the dell 730 server. i went to ebay, couldn’t find any that i thought fit my needs due to them being mostly prebuilt. ended up settling on a bespoke build company ordered what i thought i needed and waited for it to arrive. during the interim i scoured the internet for more information. i knew what i wanted to run on it, proxmox ve 8.4, and knew i wanted to go with a zfs filesystem for storage. i really like the redundancy and snapshots this filesystem gave me and having some familiarity with btrfs from my arch based garuda laptop felt it was manageable. i knew that meant two things – higher memory use and large capacity sas drives. so what i ordered was dell 730xp (didnt really know the differences between and xp and a 730 vanilla) it had a onboard mini monolithic raid card 730 series a 4 spot intel NIC card w/ 2 1gb and 2 10gb ports, 2x v4 e2640 10 core xeon processors, 64GB ECC ram, 2 sff 2.5″ hdd and 12 3.5″ caddys and dual 495w psu. digging into it i saw immediately that i needed more, the whole reason i went down this rabbit hole was to transcode and store my ever-growing media files – 4k movies and series take up alot of space and i needed a pci gpu of some sort to make it happen. more forums and searching. m40 nvidia, m40 v2 nvidia, i ordered them both. good thing, cause i ended up frying one of em. processors seemed a little limited so i ordered 2x v4 e2698s for more cores (probably overkill) and 512 gb ecc ram. reading more of course made me order a different raid card…i needed a mini monolithic hba330 card in IT mode for zfs – thanks artofserver <-this dude knows his shit, and some sas hdds. i went with 6 18TB sas drives for future expansion (already half full) and the above was my starting point or so I thought.