A little while ago I did a video on an HP MicroServer, you guys told me to check out the Gen 8… and then I got distracted on eBay and somehow ended up with a Dell PowerEdge T330 instead. I paid just under $200 (about $250 after tax/shipping), mostly because I’m a sucker for drive bays, but also because it has “real server” stuff you don’t usually get in consumer boxes: redundant hot-swap PSUs, a front control panel with error readouts, iDRAC-style remote management, and ECC memory support with the Xeon E3 platform. In this video I tear it down, clean it up, replace missing drive caddies, and even 3D print some feet because the previous owner had it rack mounted and it was sitting crooked. Then I start testing the stuff that actually matters for a home lab: power draw (I saw ~36–37W idle with both PSUs, ~33–34W with one), noise (loud at boot, calmer once settled), storage options (8 bays plus extra SATA via mini-SAS), and OS choices (Proxmox vs TrueNAS Scale). The frustrating part is it’s so close to being perfect: PCIe passthrough gave me IOMMU mapping headaches, there’s no bifurcation, it wouldn’t boot from NVMe on a PCIe adapter, and the integrated graphics idea for transcoding fell apart because the T330 disables iGPU in favor of the Matrox adapter. Great NAS potential, but it’s packed with “whoops” moments if you’re trying to do more than basic storage.