the whole reasoning for this is simple. i was running out of hard drive space on my main server, so what a great idea it was to get another server. i decided to setup strict limits on what i should get. i need at least ddr4 ram, 4 cores or more, hyper-threading is a plus. upgradable ram and storage. i was also trying to spend less than fifty dollars on the server. i looked and looked, and i was mainly looking for hp elitedesks and prodesks. i eventually went with an elitedesk from ebay, sold for twenty six dollars and with shipping it came out to just under fifty dollars. i am glad i got it since it was the only one left in stock. it came with sixteen gigs of ram, no ssd or storage, or even the slim optical drive. it was a bare bones system, which i actually wanted.

i knew the cost of the system was fine, but it was the storage that i cannot escape. i decided to look at used and re-certified enterprise hard drives. i looked all over the place from ebay, go hard drive, amazon, and server part deals. i decided to go with renewed hgst eight terabyte hard drives. they look like they can survive a long time and i got two of them. which comes back to why i bought the elitedesk, it supports two three and a half inch hard drives. whereas the prodesk supports one. the elitedesk i got also supports two nvme m.2 slots, so i can take advantage of that. i also got an hba sas card in it mode to passthrough the hard drives to the virtual machine.

yes, i decided to install a second instance of proxmox, i will join them to a cluster, but that will be in the future when i get a third node and all of them a dual gigabit network card. by documentation, proxmox clusters work better when they have their own dedicated link to each other, decreases latency. for now, i will keep the two nodes separate. i think i will go with the same model of elitedesk, as it can be a one to one system, in the event of a powerloss or server shutdown, it can migrate over just fine. other than that, i bought a cheap one hundred twenty eight gig sata ssd for the boot drive. my plan is to get another two ssds for a raid one storage pool that is fast and redundant. i am considering that or to get two nvme drives, since they are similar prices. you know what, i will do that.