Free servers tend to cost a LOT of money.

ebay

low density sticks are pretty cheap

drives? ebay or serverpartdeals… Servers usually support SAS disks, and sometimes you can find those for cheap since there is lower 2nd hand market demand.

I too brought home some of those generation Dells… 340, 440, 6515, and 7517… All LFF.

I want to replace my $50 auction find C240-M3 chassis, but dont want to give up 24 bays of SFF

LOL

I did this 2 different ways with a C240-M3 and a Supermicro 16 bay chassis. Both, i used an ATX power on adapter to keep the jbod power supplies on, and some fan power splitters to keep fans on the HDDs.

First was using a 16port external HBA with SFF-8088 and finding SFF8088 to SATA cables to connect to the SM chassis backplane. It was jank AF.

Second was using the same 16e HBA with short SFF8088 cables, and some SFF 8087 - 8088 adapter cards in the back of the SM chassis. So much cleaner, much happier with how I was able to add 16 LFF disks to the C240-M3

https://www.amazon.com/CableDeconn-SFF-8088-SFF-8087-Adapter-Bracket/dp/B00PRXOQFA

Underrated comment

homelab and /r/selfhosted is usually overlap