EtherMan

It really depends. For like a desktop, I'd avoid unless it was really cheap as I'd basically nullifies the value of all non standard parts and I'd include things like cpu if the motherboard is nonstandard. So value basically becomes only like drives and such.

For a server though, non standard is the norm and hete vendors even do stuff like vendorlocking instead which then IMO is a way bigger issue, especially since knowing beforehand if it does or not isn't something anyone actually tells you before testing.

You're using experimental drivers and force unmounting... And you actually have the gall to then try to pin the blame for errors from that on ntfs? Just no.

ntfs does have many issues which is why ms is developing refs to replace it. But stability or corruption isn't one of those issues. Ntfs is extremely solid in that regard due to the journaling.

Ntfs drivers in linux are however very buggy and generally considered experimental and that you should not write to ntfs drives if there's any data you care about as it could easily destroy all data there.

If you need a common writable data area then use exfat, not ntfs.

I have 7 dual cpu servers so I might be a bit biased in this regard. But worthwhile is like entirely subjective. Robust is also a weird wordchoice since there's multiple conflicting interpretations on that.

For worthwhile... Well, it's as I said subjective, but cost efficiency is very rarely the driving factor for homelabs.

For robust, do you mean robust in the sense of more powerful? Then ofc a dual slot server will be more robust but then you again are back to worthwhile. If you mean robust in terms of stability. Then absolutely not. Multi socket servers are much less stable than single core. Not unstable by any stretch, but not AS stable. Every additional component you add will always add complexity, and most importantly, additional points of possible failures. While at the same time, the system can't survive if one CPU dies, hence stability of the system is lower the more CPU sockets you have. That's why dual and quad are so popular even if 8 slot and more actually existing and is denser which is important in datacenters. But after quad slot, you start getting actual issues of system stability that it's usually better to sacrifice some density and go for more servers instead and blade centers are usually not THAT much lower density.