You should actually look at what's available. You can get a QNAP box with an ARM CPU with lots of drive slots, dual 2.5 gig Ethernet and dual 10 gig SFP+ for like $700, among many more examples. Sure saturating those is gonna eat a ton of cycles and run like shit but... yeah of course it is it's a cheap low power CPU. They suck for the sorts of stuff I wanna do, but this is inherently a market segment that involves compromise and that is probably perfect for some people.
I agree I'd much rather roll my own system (and that's what I did) and I would personally never buy one of those, but it's simply not right to say there are no options available if you want a low power server off the shelf. Some of them are even decent if you wanna pay for it.
I agree I'd much rather roll my own system (and that's what I did) and I would personally never buy one of those, but it's simply not right to say there are no options available if you want a low power server off the shelf. Some of them are even decent if you wanna pay for it.