Got an old SuperMicro server dual Xeon 5310s. What do?

Hardware Hub
1

So i got old SuperMicro server from my brother, i think its from around 2009 ish. Thought it would be a real neat thing to try exploring linux and different computing tasks on.

However i find my self at a stand still in my decision making.

Im wondering at this point if i should put any money into it to make it gaming capable or if i should just turn it into a firewall or file storage/backup system.

Ultimately id like to run it so that my other brother that i live with could game with me(he doesnt have a machine) and i imagine i could still use half the machine as a router or NAS like machine if i split it into 2 VMs.

Is this idea worth while? iver never had the chance to fiddle with these machines before.

Stats:

2x Xeon 5310(4Cores each, 1.6GHz clocks, no HyperThreading).
24GB of Kingston FB-DIMM(32GB capable).
Adaptec 5805 Raid controller, SATA2, capable of 8 drives(came with 7).

Here are my current limiting factors:

CPU:
1. I would ideally need to get the Higher end(2.66/3 GHz) 53XX or even 54XX CPUs to run games well. ive experienced that in debian it runs just as slow if not slower than my Core2Duo E4500 at its base clock.

So the most burning question that i have is: is it worth it to upgrade to the higher 54xx or 53xx series CPUs or is the machine so old its not worth investing in?

GPU:
2. A very irritating thing about this machine is its PCIE port is backwards meaning that id need a riser and external power supply to run even one of my Radeon HD 7850s. Is this worth while to pursue or should i move on and focus on useful services rather than making it a gaming capable machine? i dont want to dump money into faulty risers just for it to not work or get damaged.

Hard Drives:
3. Currently im wiping one of the 750 gig drives. This takes forever, about a month i believe, is this worth my time? I believe there is nothing on them (my brother didnt tell me what he had done with it and i didnt care to check before wiping, i wanted a clean state and did not realize the consequences of wiping).

My biggest concern with the drives is that when i initially started wiping them someone flipped the breaker causing the machine to go down and now the 750gig's cannot be put into an array. Im not sure if i should wait the month its going to take for the raid card format or if i should stop the wipe and just use the OS tools to wipe the drives(is there a good tool for this?).

Any suggestions?
Im not trying to spend much and i dont really want to make purchases that could equal the value of an AMD R7-1700 or R5 rig. am i best off just using it to host services for myself?

Thanks in advance.
Not sure if this qualifies as Enterprise so im just putting it in the Hardware category.

1 Like
2

I would try the OS tools to wipe the drive. A month for a 750 Gigabyte Wipe sounds excessive to me. Maybe even plug the drive in your computer and format it there. Why even the low-level format and not just a simple quick-format?

I would not try and make that thing a gaming rig. It has 8 cores and a bunch of RAM but it will probably be slower than one of those 100$ Dell Optiplexes with an i5-2400 in games.

Depending on what you would pay for the higher clocked CPUs that might be a fun thing to do. Not really the most long lasting decision ever but a fun one. I'd pull the trigger at 25$ a pop.

Stuff you could do with this system:
- Build a Steam Cache Server (or Uplay, or GOG or Origin)
- Play around with Open Media Vault and NAS functionality
- Install a plex server and build your own Netflix in your home
- Install a general browser cache
- Host a minecraft server
- Set up a DNS server that blocks ads (like the pi-hole)
- play around with RAM disks
- try ripping DVDs via network with dvd::rip

3

Those CPUs were released in 2006.

Looks like the best CPU you could in that socket would be a Xeon X5492, however it has a much higher TDP than what's currently in the system. The power and/or cooling in your chassis might not be sufficient. Also, they appear to be running about $70-90 on eBay, which I think is too much. The Xeon E5450 would be more reasonable at around $20-30 each. Make sure you have a sufficiently updated BIOS though.

Personally I would not invest in any enterprise hardware older than around Westmere era (11th gen Dell, 6th gen HP).

A month to wipe a drive is absurd. Perhaps the drives are not in good health?

4

Oh the motherboard is from 2008 its the second rev. not sure the ID atm. im sure not all of the parts are from 2006 and so i was trying to go with the latest critical component.

Yeah i had looked up the 5492 and was rather turned off to the TDP(i dont want to toast the guest room, and draw too much power) and that price isnt very ideal, i could definitely translate that price to a nice newer machine.

That E5450 would be nice though, i definitely dont want to spend much on this machine but thats probably the most i would want to. not to mention i can probably expect around the same amount of heat. Thanks for the suggestion.

yeah im not really trying to "Invest" in this machine, if i can make some upgrades relatively cheaply then i will but im not expecting this machine to be all powerful, i mean if my rigs motherboard could take 2 processors id beat it out hands down. but thats not the case so this SuperMicro server is the best i have to work with.

its always possible that the drives are old and worn out they are second hand if not third(original guy used this server as his vm server for quite some time). I suppose i could try replacing them i have a candidate for purchase i just dont want to pay out for something it came with from the start...
which is really why im at a stand still with my drives, because i dont know if that speed is to be expected or if its horribly wrong and i should start mourning my dead drives. Deep down inside i dread that that could be the case.

5

Core i5's? of course not this thing is practically a dinosaur. the point was to make due. use what i have to try and get something. i mean hell if i wanted to make a cheap gaming rig id turn around and sell my telescope and a few other things. this came to me practically out of thin air.

Although in regards to gaming performance im sure it would be more than fine, A single one of these processors has the equivalent processing capabilities of my A8-7600 err i think id have to check it might have been a different APU.

as far as the processor, yeah i dont really expect this server to last long. im sure after a few years ill have no use for it and move on. but it would be nice to have it kicking some ass now.

Thanks for the ideas though, i definitely could look in to using most of those, Although quite frankly im tired of hosting minecraft servers, cant really port out anyways(these nice things are blocked by my ISP) so id be playing alone.

6

I just wanted to discurage you from spending the 100$ on the X5492s for gaming as a purpose if you could get more power for the money.

Regarding drives: You could check their SMART data to see what they have been through.
With smartmontools it is:
sudo smartctl -a /dev/sdX
with X being whatever your driveletter is.

7

Or use GSmartControl if you're a GUI peasant like me. :D

8

I'll include you in my prayers and hope to pray the gay gui away then.

9

Sounds like the ideal playground for a Proxmox install so you can dick around with multiple distros, even try some turnkey linux stuff.

10

Thanks Donald.

... oh, sorry Garfield. For a second you sounded like a completely different .. cartoon figure. :P

Yes! It is low power, enough cores, enough RAM ... it's perfect. Make it a playground.

11

No wipe should take a month on a drive that size unless the read/write head is degraded or the disc is dying a very slow painful death. I've done three passes on a 2 TB drive using shred and it took less than 18 hours to do that. Plug that drive into another computer and do a diagnostic, i'm willing to bet it's garbage.

12

Sell it and buy a Ryzen

13

Here's a more challenging idea I have for you: try to get Openstack or Ceph running, you have lots of hard disks so your hardware is ideal for a Ceph cluster with a few OSDs, you don't need a RAID controller for Ceph, but you will need enough ports for your disks. I wouldn't invest anything in this machine to be honest, just use it for something or sell it.
Smartmontools will tell you if your drives's health is good, the short test takes 2 minutes, run it on each drive and it will give you lots of information such as for long the drives have been used. If you want a super clean state for your drives, wipe them with dd.

14

Definitely going to use smartmontools just need to get linux on a disk. server only takes a disk and im on my last disk writer... all the others have fallen in combat(more like: were built to fail).

thanks for the suggestion.

took out the 750GB disks and put them in my machines hotswap bay and fiddled around with them in windows. they seem to be willing to form an array now but clearly it wont matter until i can check the actual integrity of the drives.

looking into Openstack right now. kind of confused whether or not its a full OS or just a mediator. edit: is it just an application for server type linux?

15

When there is "open" in the Name there must be a Linux kernel in there somewhere :)

As far as I have understood the Wiki article: It is a mediation software that needs a hypervisor to function (of which it supports pretty much all there are).
I do not get why one would try to do Openstack on one machine. The same goes for Ceph. Why would you install all the components for a distributed system on one machine?

I would try proxmox first and then go mad with all the different distros.

16

i thought it was a VM hosting capable software? im merely looking into it have no idea what it really is. still trying to see if i can find an unscratched disk for my OS....

17

Single-node Ceph makes a slight bit of sense in the case where you want to be able to add or remove from a storage pool one disk at a time, which ZFS cannot do.

OpenStack is a collection of software for building your own cloud infrastructure. It is used as an alternative to services such as AWS and Azure, either for a private cloud or to resell.

I think a more suitable choice would be oVirt, which is kind of like an open-source alternative to vSphere/ESXi.

But unless you have a particular interest in enterprise software, pretty much any Linux distro with QEMU/KVM and virsh or virt-manager will be fine if you just need to run VMs.

18

Oh i see you kind of helped me connect the dots with virtualization a little(its good to know KVM is the hypervisor for linux distros).