You can go with Celeron (cheaper) instead of Pentium.
I was thinking the Pentium so I could have the CPU doing some light burstcoin mining on the side and read the HDD's a little faster
Is there a coin that can be CPU-mined that will earn more than pennies per day, once power consumption is factored in? My dedicated mining rig is a Celeron G3920. My main desktop (also doing some mining on the side) is a Core i5 4690K. According to the NiceHash Miner's benchmark function, the Core i5 would pull in about
BTC0.0001 (about $0.25) per day...figure maybe $7.50 per month. A couple of GPUs will make that much in a day. I leave CPU mining disabled.
You don't have to go with expensive SSD, simply get any cheap regular hard drive.
I was thinking from a general power standpoint that SSD takes less... Does the power consumption really make this much of difference in respect to the HD used in a rig?
Spinning rust will pull several watts to keep it running, after briefly using a few tens of watts to spin up. An SSD's power consumption is nearly negligible by comparison. If you go with an M.2 SSD (like I did), it'll slot into a connector on the motherboard, with no power or data cables needed. It doesn't take much; 120 GB (smallest size that's readily available) is way more than enough.
Then again, if you already have a hard drive (or other usable components) gathering dust, every component you don't have to buy has zero days to ROI. Most of the mining rig is new (or purchased used, in the case of my GPUs...scored an MSI GeForce GTX 1070 Gaming X this past weekend for only $340), but the power supply was taken from a Gridseed ASIC rig that's no longer profitable to run.