Background: After building a NAS out of a NanoPi Neo 2, and finding the bus throughput very lacklustre (20-40 MB/sec, sustained, at best!), I find myself sort of wishing I had just started with an older PC, instead of an ARM SBC.
Motivation: ~8-year-old PC's are cheap on the market, like $100US or less (many SBC's come out that expensive when you factor in shipping from China, taking about a month). These PC's can then be upgraded cheaply with a good, inexpensive GbE PCI card, and a USB 3 PCI card (with a NEC chip on it, **not** VIA).
Question: What are some good "brand name" mini-tower case PCs (still available easily and cheaply on the used PC market), which will internally hold at least three 3.5" SATA drives (2 to be used in a RAID 0 mirror, and the third to be used as an internal backup), and a 2.5" SATA drive (for running the OpenMediaVault OS on)?
The hardware inside should be adequately linux compatible. The ethernet on the mobo need not work, and it need not have USB 3, because these can be added from dirt-cheap PCI cards nowadays. The mobo needs to have 2 free PCI slots (which should be PCIe).
After some research, I found that Dell Optiplexes in the Mini-Tower (MT) form factor (FF) from the "series 4" line make good candidates.
These DELL Optiplexes (in the Mini-Tower "MT" form factor only!) would be the following. Models:
980
390
790
990
580
3010
Note: all of these listed had a CPU better than an Intel Core 2 Duo!
Anyone else have any "oldies but goodies" to recommend?
Photos are appreciated as well.