I'm still running an old Gen 8 MicroServer. Modern drives can actually saturate the SATA controller, and because it only has a single PCIe slot I can't add both a 10Gb NIC and a storage controller - I went with the 10Gb NIC.
It works well enough though and has lasted me over a decade at this point. 16GB DDR3 ECC, an old 4 core/8 thread Xeon, 4x14TB drives and the Mellanox NIC.
It works well enough though and has lasted me over a decade at this point. 16GB DDR3 ECC, an old 4 core/8 thread Xeon, 4x14TB drives and the Mellanox NIC.