Reddit mentions of Intel Ethernet Converged Network Adapter X540-T2

> I see a lot of talk about ECC RAM in this sub, is it a worthwhile investment for my purposes?

ECC alone does basically nothing 99.99% of the time. However it's an extra step to ensuring stability and continued use of your server. As it will stop OS from operating on encountering bigger memory errors and can automatically fix smaller ones. So if your RAM is starting to show it's age or you just got a faulty stick then you have an extra insurance. How important is it? Well, worst case scenario in ECC vs non-ECC is losing all your data. This can happen with ZFS filesystem which is in a way a successor to standard Raid setups. It can self-repair, works faster than hardware raid in many cases, does checksumming for you, just nice and good stuff. However in order to do any of that it needs to be able to trust your memory to not damage data along the way. Here's a better explanation, it also shows you why ECC memory can matter.

In general - you do want ECC RAM. It is not a must have in a homelab but it doesn't hurt you either.

Also - have you looked at other options? MiniITX is also a place where Xeons D are available. Here's a bigger review of preexisting servers using those. And here's a nice and long list of motherboards alone (they have CPU soldered in to them). Pros:

• 4x RDIMM DDR4 RAM slots. Meaning up to 128GB RAM (via 4x32GB sticks). It also works with standard desktop RAM if you want it instead.
  
• Many of these come with 10G Ethernet rather than 1G.
  
• You get features like remote management via IPMI.
  
• If you look around those can be also really cheap especially when bought used. I got AsRock D1520-D4I board (comes with 4C/8T CPU) for 240€. Even new it's not that expensive - for instance. $453 for a CPU, motherboard and 2x 10Gb Ethernet is not a bad deal. Especially if you remember how much the latter costs alone.
  
• I guess they also come with more personalization options. Since you can find variants with more CPU cores (although I discourage going for more than 6, maaaybe 8, prices get ridiculous), different NICs (SFP+ instead of/on top of RJ45 for example), potentially insane numbers of hard drives (some of these boards support up to 20 at once without any extra controllers) etc.
  
  > I am also looking for case suggestions, as I said lower profile is preferred
  
  We talking mostly a file server I assume? Have you looked at Fractal Design Node series? They definitely aren't tall.