I’ve been pricing out components for my first new build in 20 years. (I’ve bought many ebay servers and a few mini PCs in between).
The parts are around $2k. But then I look at the amd ai max+ 395 PCs that are out or coming out shortly and I think I might be buying an already obsolete platform. For the same price I’d get 16 cores and over 2x the memory bandwidth.
Just saying I agree, I use a USB-attached HDD enclosure because it’s trivial to have a lot of hot swap HDD in that sort of product, and even the moderately slower USB-3 that some use is generally up to the task to keeping up with a handful of spinning platters.