I’ve been pondering what I’d set up at home if I was going to go all out but keep the cost within realistic limits.
- Mac Pro dual quad core Xeon, lots of RAM
- Highpoint RocketRAID 2322 PCI-Express x4 SATA II RAID Controller w/ RAID 5 and External Infiniband Support or maybe a pair of them.
- Enhance E8-ML Multi-Lane 8-bay SATA Enclosure (with Two Mini-SAS to Infiniband 4-Channel MultiLane Cables)
- Eight 750GB SATA-II HDDs or whatever’s biggest.
UPDATE (11-04-2021): it’s now ~15years later. I’ve just upgraded the home lab to 10GE and arrays of 12 and 14TB disks. NVMe SSDs are up at 2 and 4TB in size, with speeds and latencies that weren’t even dreamed of not long ago. Latest lab server is an AMD 8core/16thread cpu.