Budget: Undecided. No hard limit, as long as it’s reasonable. maybe 150-200 usd equivalent.
Location: Norway.

Keychron looks like they have what I’m after. The Q5 looks nice.

Nah, I work for a geophysical company with a bunch of storage clusters and data crunchers around the world.

Depends on which aspect of you needs to be ready. Use case and functionality? Meh, now is as good time as any. Might as well get used to the differences from a desktop to servers early on. Especially if you still don’t really have the knowledge. Learn by doing!

Budget? True, they can be pricey, even on the after market. But if you or a friend works anywhere that had servers, chances are that the IT department might have something that’d otherwise end up in the trash. A good example here is this VM server with rather old CPUs and 256G of RAM. It wasn’t fit for its pyrpose anymore, and its hardware configuration made it a bad match for our storage clusters. Today it’s a minecraft server for my kids and their friends.

EDIT: Actually, the older PowerEdge servers feom Dell aren’t that pricey on my local marketplace.

Servers: Supermicro. Dell in a pinch
Switches: HPE Aruba for 10gig, or Mellanox for 100gig
Routers: I’m not that picky, but I use Fortigate as I scavenged some leftovers at work
UPS: Eaton
Network cards: Intel for 10gig, IBM for 8 or 16gig, Mellanox for 100gig
Harddrives: Exos
RAID stuff: LSI MegaRaid.
GPU: Don’t really care, but I have a bunch of NVidia Quadro.

Most of the above preferences are due to scavenging leftover hardware at work.

In the same rack as the router we usually have two 48P PoE switches in a stack8ng configuration. Depending on the scale of the setup, we often have the same type of switches elsewhere, trunked in via 10gig fber. On rare occasions we have a bunch of extra fibers for which we use Aruba 3810 with only SFP ports.

We also have 100gig in use, but that’s only for a few closed off networks between the servers, with its dedicated Mellanox switch. While they do connect to the 10gig network via a breakout cable, the 100gig bandwidth is only needed internally in the cluster.

This. When my favourite floppies started to have a worn sleeve (especially 3.5", where that metal protective covers started to bend out a bit, threatening to jam in the drive), I usually transplanted the disk itself over to a new sleeve.