I use whatever is cheapest at the time of buying. I just make sure they’re not SMR.

Given that you’re “most comfortable” with windows is probably the number one reason why you should go with something other than Windows. I think you should always get out of your comfort zone and expand your knowledge. Sure you can keep using windows but why but branch out! Hell if you really want to take a leap of faith load up TrueNAS core 🤣

Also the 9xx servers like the R930 you mentioned are 4U.

That UI is from Ubiquiti Unifi and more specifically he’s probably running a UDM-Pro or UDM Special Edition.

Letter determines if it’s rack mounted ® or a tower (T). First number is the model the higher that number the more higher end the model is. Second number arguably the most important is the generation or how old it is. Example being I’d take a R340 server over a R710. R340 being a lower model but newer and faster generation… hope that helped make sense.

Damn I feel spoiled I pay 12.4384¢ per kWh where I live.

Edit: Actually I just check apparently it went up to 14.69¢ per kWh 😂

For clustering 2 nodes should be fine and so would no shared storage. However if HA clustering is your goal then shared storage and at least 3 other nodes is pretty much the only way to do HA clustering properly. Sure you could do it without 3 nodes and without shared storage but it wouldn’t be the proper way. 3 servers are needed because of how quorum works. Without that 3rd node both nodes will start considering the other one as down and they each vote for themselves and act accordingly and ultimately you risk potential outage and if replication is used you even risk data corruption. Now that’s not that big of a deal in a home lab but kinda defeats the purpose of HA. Now as for shared storage you don’t need it but it’s definitely much better than replication because 1. replication is very taxing on the network and 2. You don’t have to worry about how often to replicate the data therefore your data is never “behind”. Personally I set my HA clusters up with Ceph as my shared storage but nothing is stopping you from using ZFS it’s really up to you on what shared storage method you wanna use.