There is way too much hand-waving and assuming going on this article. It is a load of BS that does not take into account real-world inefficiencies. e.g. sometimes buying in bulk is more expensive than buying at retail, esp when you need consistent supply. Sure, you may need only an hour of sysadmin time a day, but what sysadmin will let you employ them an hour a day? The buildout did not list a CPU. The assumptions about uptime are over-amortized, an outage given the resources they quote may average out to 95% uptime but their latency for getting systems back up is going to be absolutely terrible and I’d be surprised if outages were shorter than a day or two on average. They aren’t factoring in cooling. They aren’t factoring in the drastically reduced lifetime of drives in their ridiculously cramped and under-ventilated cubbies. They are completely ignoring diagnostic time, presuming they can only quote actual repair times, which is an absolute joke given the lack of smart hardware and enterprise DC management. They think they can average out throughout over the number of drives not taking into account per-channel limitations. They are not taking into account the extra time to build and dismantle systems in their hacked-together IKEA shelves. They are underestimating the costs of electricity at commercial rates. I could go on and on, but suffice to say that I would never, ever use their network for any purpose without another backup (which they don’t finger into their costs, of course ;). I thought B2 was risky; this is taking it to an entirely different level.
It did, or does now anyway, the RYZEN 3 1200 for $95.
EDIT: Although the better option is the 3200G so that you can actually get a display output from the thing. Same price, so it doesn't really change anything, but it does cut the CPU core count down a bit if that matters at all.
That said the buildout still doesn't work because you can't actually plug the "sata splitter" cable they linked into the motherboard. Because the splitter was actually a 4-lane SAS SFF-8087 breakout cable, and there's no consumer motherboard with 8x of those connectors on it. Good luck finding even 1 or 2 of those connectors on a consumer board, and it sure as hell won't be at dirt cheap prices.
So you either need 4x the computers they calculated, or you need to budget for add-in SATA/SAS controller cards. Which, because they aren't used in consumer land, are not cheap. You could go used, but that's still going to increase the bottom line (and won't be a reliable source of parts)
They also aren't factoring in assembly time nor budgeting for that. Building these isn't going to go very quickly.
I have gotten away with cheap PCIex1 2xSATA2 adapter cards, for roughly 10-15USD at the time of purchase. They did work, but this assumes a motherboard with room for lots of PCIe cards.
Edit: to clarify on the CPU usage, could a potential build also get away with a cheap AMD Athlon 3000G?
