If you’re looking to get a real server you’ll probably get more for your money on /r/homelabsales. There are some amazing deals at around the $300-400 price point with much more modern hardware than that dell.

I migrated my server (mainly Plex but lots of other stuff too) from windows bare metal to windows docker to Linux docker. The main reason was to avoid docker running in a VM with the overhead and networking issues that a native Linux install avoids. In the end I’m very glad I did. Docker just makes everything so easy to setup, manage, backup and migrate if needed. My server is very stable and almost never needs to be fiddled with or restarted. Also I learned a ton which then springboarded into other homelab stuff like running a proxmox server, opnsense firewall, remote gaming server, etc.

My oldest is a Toshiba 4tb with about 60k PoH, no errors and still runs cool. The plan was to replace it with a larger disk when it died but it just refuses to.