Hi all, with the dreaded your bills are going up as always come January, I've been looking at an old workstation to purpose as a all in one server. Mainly storage, VM's and my play thing, which has led me to something like a Dell T5600 or HP Z640, some offering 2x Xeon's for little price difference.

Does anyone know how hungry these are on power during low use compared to a modern Ryzen system?

I have a spare PC, i5 7th gen, 16gb Ram and 500gb SSD with a 2TB hard drive. I fancied purposing for a storage server, all my other devices around the house are Windows, should I just pop on Windows 11 Pro, or are there any benefits to going for a flavour of Linux? I would maybe like to play around with a VM or two as well.

I also have a limitation that this needs to be wireless (for now) can I still assign a dedicated local IP addresses to the host and various VM's? I'd also welcome some suggestion for me to dabble in or guides :-)