These boxes have limitations. Disk bays are one of those limitations. You get one and maybe two 3.5 bays tops. You can add a HBA and external drives, but then no 10Gb networking. What is your use case that needs 10Gb? Could you live with 2.5G?
this post was submitted on 01 Nov 2023
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Personally I am not a fan of HP stuff.
I recently put together a Lenovo P520 Workstation and it's been phenomenal - can hit your target budget no problem. (It's a tower fyi).
HP = Horrible Products (their printers are the worst)
HPE = Hell of Paywall'd Equipment (decent hardware, shitty business practice)
Used Dell Optiplex can be a good value. Can get 6 cores, an expansion slot, Intel QSV for Plex. Might not have space or PSU connections for HDDs, because most cheap, small PCs have SSDs these days.
A lot of the cheap mass produced PCs will have limited motherboard/PSU combinations. Even if they have a SATA port, they're probably not going to have multiple HDD power connections. You would run into that problem with the HP Elitedesk too, unless you got a new power solution.