Hello Forum,
Im planning on building or well just adding stuff to an old Enterprise desktop surplus.
I will buy a Dell Optiplex 7010 with an i5 3570(Really cheap possibly an 3770 but will see, i dont think the HT Will help much), i have like 32gb of ram just collecting dust and a healthy amount of Sata 2.5" HDD that im not using.
So my plan its to take the 7010, get an Icy Dock with 4 or 6 2.5" Hotswappable on the form of 5.25" bays. i have an Intel 100/pro dual NIC and a cheapo Sata x5 pcie card for the Drives, then installing Windows Server or ESXi and use it as a NAS/Homeserver.
i just checked and the i5 has VTD and VTx so maybe Virtualize something like Unraid, Xpenology or Freenas?,
What do you think? its just to mess around i dont need Production level hardware or 99.9995% uptime, mostly for movies, shares and possibly on the future for Storage of IP Cameras.
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Sounds good… just test the hell out of your RAM. (Memtest86+)
The FreeNAS crew will scream “ECC” at you and call you dirty names.
But other than that, I’m sure you’ll be fine.
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Sounds like a good project!
The 3770 is a solid bump of like 30% over the 3570 in tasks that use the extra threads effectively, and the extra 2mb of cache (8 vs 6mb) plus 100mhz turbo speed normally means it just barely edges out its i5 brother regardless of the workload. I couldn’t say if its worth it for your application, but the Ivy bridge i7’s are very capable in workstations or gaming systems even today… in terms of passmark score even going as new as the 6700 only nets you an extra 7.5% all core and 4.1% single core (the step from Ivy to Haswell saw a doubling of Ring Bus Bandwidth and a much better memory layout and controller, so the all core scaling improved far more than the actual core speeds did). Both the non-k I5 and I7 should have the VTD and VTx you want, for some reason they omitted it on the K series for a while (although its back now).
I would certainly recommend you go the hypervisor layer (be it ESXi or something like Xen) over doing a bare metal windows server install… its typically a little more stuffing around, but you learn a lot more, and can much more rapidly try different ideas or add features without worrying about disrupting the other functionality your actually using.
Final note, keep in mind the old saying “raid is not a backup!”, NAS or otherwise, you’ll want some copies of your important files (and just as critically, there decryption keys if applicable) spread around, ideally including some cold disks offsite (literally in a box in your parents ceiling will do)… not saying you aren’t already on the ball already, but its SUPER easy to get caught out when you’ve got a great automatic backup system, then something like fire\flood\theft literally takes all the PC’s and disks in a building, and you WILL discover irreplaceable content even if you think you don’t have any.
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