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So i've been looking for a cheap (price and electricity cost) small server for home use of MariaDB (MySQL's better sister).
By cheap i mean somewhere in the ballpark of $300.
At first i thought about
HP ProLiant MicroServer G7 N54L
It is small, very power efficient, has ECC memory but pretty crappy processor.
And it made me think, although in enterprise solutions processor usually isn't a bottleneck in DB applications, however all those microsevers (which IMO are more suited for NAS) have crappy CPUs. I cannot find any realiabale data or benchmarks of those low power CPUs, taking into account DB workloads.
So i searched for aftermarket servers and found HP DL365 and HP DL80. They cost pretty much the same as N54L, have more RAM and better CPU. With those i wouln't be concerned about CPU bottlenecking it, but they crave power and require SAS drives (which are expensive, especially SSDs).
So, even that N54L is a bit more expensive than those used servers and have nicer form factor for a home use (i'd put it in my closet) i'm stil afraid that CPU woud become bottleneck.
Important thing, it's not some idle DB, it is set of 40 InnoDB tables, totalling 180GiB. On average 200 inserts/s, 40 updates/s, 5 deletes/s, everything transactional, averaging 5 operations per transaction, taking no more than 3 seconds each trx. Currently i run this DB on Pentium D 2.66GHz (two cores), 16GiB of RAM, RAID0 (speed) HDDs with daily backups. Pretty old stuff and DB servers aint going past 25% of CPU, but dont know how it would scale to that lower power one from N54L.
Also i don't want to top this servers CPU resources with DB, as this machine does other things too.

Tl;DR:
I need good, reliable, low cost, low power server for heavy MariaDB workloads.