I believe you should buy second hand hardware for that. Can't beat the price and you've tons of gamers and offices trying to get rid of perfectly good hardware for what you're trying to do. I mean a 8th gen i5 CPU will most likely be idle or in low usage most of the time.
I would say to buy i5-8500T or more recent (because you can run a full machine on 8W on that). You can either go for a micro ATX motherboard with that and RAM second hand OR pick an HP Mini ProDesk with the same CPU, both options will be about 130€. Check this example.
The thing with the Minis from HP is that they come with everything, NVME, power supply, ram and ready to go. Most of those more recent machines come with 2x NVME + 1 SATA + USB-C.
If you're comfortable with taking the board out of the case you can place it anywhere and add a M2 to SATA adapter on both NVME slots for about 22€ each and have like 12 SATA HDDs connected to it. If you don't want mess with the hardware you can get a USB DAS for your disks, since it's all USB-C you will not notice any performance impact.
Those machines will outperform your CPU pick by a lot while being cheaper and power efficient on idle.
Get a USB-C DAS (enclosure) for your disks, those use their own power supply. Since it is USB-C performance will be very good and stable and you'll be happy with it.
because you want to learn them or just think they’re neat, then please do! I suspect a lot of people with these types of home setups are doing it mostly for that reason
Are you sure? A big bank usually does... It's very common to see groups of physical machines + public cloud services that are more strictly controlled than others and serve different purposes. One group might be public apps, another internal apps and another HVDs (virtual desktops) for the employees.
If you're using a VPS from Amazon, Digital Ocean or wtv you're by definition not self-hosting. Still dependent on some cloud company, so not self-hosting in a pure sense... misread comment.
I'm curious is there documented attacks that could've been prevented by this?
From my understanding CPU pinning shouldn't be used that much, the host scheduler is aware that your VM threads are linked and will schedule child threads together. If you pin cores to VM's, you block the host scheduler from making smart choices about scheduling. This is mostly only an issue if your CPU is under constraint, IE its being asked to perform more work than it can handle at once. Pinning is not dedicated, the host scheduler will schedule non-VM work to your pined cores.
I'm under the impression that CPU pinning is an old approach from a time before CPU schedulers were as sophisticated, and did not handle VM threads in a smart manner. This is not the case anymore and might there be a negative performance impact with it.
Yeah, laptop CPUs are low power, after all they're configured to run on battery with Windows. :)