SwiftOnSecurity on Twitter: “If you are building a home lab everything you need is on eBay and costs around $200. A SSD SATA drive in a off-lease Optiplex delivers more IOPS than an $100k server with a RAID6 we ran DBs on 10 years ago….”
Posted by jpluimers on 2026/06/22
I used to buy off-lease HP gear some 15 years ago. Nowadays I usually buy Dell 1 liter PCs for desktop usage (see my series on 3060/5060/7060) and got reminded that they also have good workstation gear that you can rackmount:
- [Wayback/Archive] SwiftOnSecurity on Twitter: “If you are building a home lab everything you need is on eBay and costs around $200. A SSD SATA drive in a off-lease Optiplex delivers more IOPS than an $100k server with a RAID6 we ran DBs on 10 years ago. Stop buying computers from apple.com it will rot your brain”
- [Wayback/Archive] Matthew Gracie on Twitter: “@SwiftOnSecurity One of these and a copy of Proxmox is an excellent homelab setup. Maybe add some disk and a couple extra NICs depending on your use case.”
[Wayback/Archive] Amazon.com: Dell Precision T7810 Workstation 2X Intel Xeon E5-2670 V3 2.3GHz 12-Core 128GB DDR4 Quadro NVS 315 480GB SSD, No Operating System (Renewed) : Electronics
Similar via [Wayback/Archive] Amazon.com: PC Server and Parts Certified Refurbished is for instance [Wayback/Archive] Amazon.com: Dell T7810 “Chia Farming” Workstation/Server, 2X Intel Xeon E5-2690 v4 up to 3.5GHz (28 Cores & 56 Threads Total), 128GB DDR4, Quadro K620 2GB Graphics Card, No HDD, No Operating System (Renewed) : Electronics.
Those are all via [Wayback/Archive] Amazon.com : Dell T7810 (PC Server and Parts Certified Refurbished), but likely [Wayback/Archive] Amazon.com : Dell T7910 are now affordable as well.
- [Wayback/Archive] SwiftOnSecurity on Twitter: “DO NOT TAKE HOME THE FREE 1U SERVER YOU DO NOT WANT THAT ANYWHERE A CLOSET DOOR WILL NOT STOP ITS BANSHEE WAIL TO THE DARK LORD AN UNHOLY CONDUIT TO THE DEPTHS OF INSOMNIA BINDING DARKNESS TO EVEN THE DAY”
Via [Wayback/Archive] sysadafterdark on Twitter: “Shout out to the TikTok creator who, during a live, told me that suggesting people homelab to get better at enterprise IT is “gatekeeping and you need to check your privilege”. I’m REALLY glad I unfollowed and muted them. It’s part of the reason I don’t fuck with anyone anymore.”
Documentation and specs via [Wayback/Archive] Dell Precision T7810 – Google Search at [Wayback/Archive] Support for Dell Precision Tower 7810 | Documentation | Dell US.
–jeroen
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 
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