For christmas 2023 i got a second hand R720 from ebay i cost around £150 it has: 2 E5-2690 v2s for a total of 20 cores at 3 GHz; 256gb of ram; duel 10gig sfp+ ports; and 16x900gb 2.5″ sas hdds (However only 2 drive sleds).
My plan for this server was to use proxmox to build an environment that gave me space to run some useful services as well as mess around with new software.
The first thing i had to do however was reflash the controller as to use pcie pass through for the drives i couldn’t use the stock dell drivers so i followed this guide (https://fohdeesha.com/docs/perc.html) which worked just fine.
