Do you think an used Xserve would be good for home cloud storage.
I wanted to know if getting a used server off Amazon would be better than a used Xserve.
Question marked as
Longer answer: If you want loud, power-hungry, hot, out-dated, unsupported, that can’t-run-current macOS, and loud rack-mount hardware and with limited support for now-older disk storage, there are other options.
Did I mention loud?
HPE MicroServer or the equivalent dinky-server such as one of the SuperMicro tiny-sized boxes, an old x86-64 desktop repurposed with OwnCloud or NextCloud or FreeNAS, a Mojave-capable Mac mini with a USB-3 or USB-C Thunderbolt disk array, a Synology Network Attached Storage (NAS) box, etc.
Most (all?) of these boxes will be quieter, too. 1U-sized rack-mount boxes built for a pair of now-ancient Xeon processors? Quiet? Not so much.
Oh, and macOS Server is not a network server and most of what was included is now deprecated and removed.
Oh, and did I mention that these old Xserve boxes are loud, during anything approaching moderate CPU activity? Or if they get dusty, and they di get dusty.
The Xserve isn’t as loud as some of the formerly-HP HPE rack-mount and Dell rack-mount servers I’ve worked with, but these rackmount are not good choices for home servers. The HPE stuff topped out around 7.3 bels. The Xserve was somewhat quieter, comparatively.
Shorter version: no. Not good choices for home servers.