SSD are not expensive these days, the Intel 545s 256GB SSD for example is very new, quite fast, and typically about US$70 (Newegg, Amazon, etc). The Xeon E3 1220 V2 is an older entry level Ivy Bridge Xeon, it was replaced by the E3 1220 V3 Haswell. TDP is 69W but so far it's been sitting around 26W in my system. I choose this because it was a lower power quad core Xeon and because I was thinking of using the server eventually at an unattended LPFM transmitter site. The whole server (IBM x3250 M4) is just 1RU and was purchased second hand (eBay, dude) for US$150, I changed out the old HDD to the SSD for reliability and the slight speed boost.
Quad core is entry level today, the low end units have four real cores but no hyper threading. This suits ST as you want real cores to share out the processing load. For the LPFM there is going to be an increased load as I want ST to create the MPX but I don't know yet what that load is going to be as I'm waiting for some low cost 24 bit 192 kHz USB DACs (<$50) to come in for testing.
8GB of RAM should be plenty from what I've seen so far.
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