If you want to use 4Kn drives, SSDs (w/trim), or easily switch between RAID and HBA modes, I would recomend an R730 with H730 controller instead. They're available on eBay with 128GB of RAM for just over $1,000 USD. If you don't want those features, an R720 is a good choice, and around half the price.

Idle power consumption of an R730 with no drives is typically about 85W, though higher-end CPUs drive that up a bit. The older R720s are a bit higher in the 100W range. When the extended warranties expire, high-spec 2nd hand equipment floods the market.

Yes, R730 would have been better. I learned that post fact.

Not criticizing at all. The R720s are still excellent servers. You can add a different RAID/HBA controller into an R720, flash LSI firmware onto the one you've got, or just put a bit more effort into ensuring you buy compatible drives. SAS SSDs just a few years old didn't even have TRIM, for example.

Yeah, I believe it’s possible to fit the perc controller from r730 to r720 so that the throughput goes up to 6mbps but I just couldn’t be bothered.

Just checked one of ours R620, dual E5-2690 v2 @ 3.00GHz, 256Gb RAM.

20% load (9 VMs with 11GHz usage), 196W.

Historical trends for Last Week:

Avg: 203 W | 693 BTU/hr

Max: 279 W | 952 BTU/hr

Min: 150 W | 512 BTU/hr

Historical Peaks:

465 W

Cumulative Reading:

Since Mon Jul 13 11:32:33 2020 2723.893 kWh

R820s idle at ~200W and consume ~500W at 100% CPU load on all 80 virtual cores.

So, if we say it draws around 350W, that makes it around $32 /mo power (rough calculation based on a 12.5cent (US) kWh rate, right? Not bad for all that beef.

And for Western Europe readers as a comparison...

UK <Apr2022 = £50.96 ($68 USD), £0.2022 price cap rate

UK >=Apr2022 = £76.16 ($102 USD) £0.3022 likely new price cap rate

Thus the reason r/homelab users in Europe tend not to have Craigslist blade servers of any sort!