So I watched the latest media server video on L1T and I really like the idea, as well as having something to mess around with VM’s or Linux, and something to do statistical calculation via R for the wife as her Macbook (2012 quadcore) is not cut out for that when it could be offloaded onto a real machine.
Main use-case would be media server with R though, the other stuff is secondary, I mostly want something relatively inexpensive to try out.
@wendell did mention in that thread that due to the virtualization bug (which I am having a very difficult time researching because anything with the words ‘Intel’ and ‘bug’ only pull up Meltdown and Spectre results right now) I should be looking for 56xx Xeons or later.
I’ve noticed a good number of Dell PowerEdge 1U and 2U servers on eBay, including an R410 for around $200, and am curious what is going on, as they seem like a lot of system for such a low price, even on 32nm Westmere EP.
Specifically the one I’m looking at hasdual X5670’s, 32GB (4x8, no mention of ECC), two HDD trays, PERC H6/iR (and boy that one confuses me, I have never run a RAID of any sort).
Is ~$200 (free shipping) a good deal for playing around like this? I’m painfully new to this side of things.
Overpriced. I picked mine up for $150 (w/ free shipping). This usually does not include the front bezel (~$25) or the rails (~$75). So unless they give you all that for the $200 price tag then you should wait to find a bit better of a deal.
Also, the 410’s are much louder than the 710’s due them being 1U.
Not sure if this matters, but check if that unit has only 1 power supply, mine did.
It’s probably ECC.
That card is a SATA2 model, mean that it only has 300 Mbps of throughput capacity. That’s my main gripe about it.
If you go to /r/homelab most of the advice you’d get is to get a middle of the road R710. These are much quieter, but a little bit more expensive depending on the configuration. But the extra room allows you to have more uses for it. For instance mine came with 8 2.5’’ bays so I put 8 SSD’s in it. Depending on which mobo comes with the R710 you could get 130 Watt CPU’s for a pretty banging system. That and you can offload a lot more RAM into it than you could with a 410.
This is a possible concern but it will live in the basement. That said, extra noise is still extra noise.
It has two.
No rails, doesn’t seem to include the bezel, does include two drive caddies out of four possible. I agree though, more drive bays would be good.
I’ll look at more 710’s. There’s someone selling a Gen2 on Craigslist north of me for $475 with dual X5650’s and 72GB, 2xPSU, bezel and the rails but that’s a bit more than I want to spend at the moment.
Well the 410 is gone, but oh boy there’s a seller on the 'Bay selling tons of servers in tons of configurations.
Do you (or anyone else reading this) have any suggestions for minimums? RAM is important on the R compute side, so I’d be hoping for 24GB minimum, as the wife says it basically comes down to memory and cores for what she does (PhD student in Stat).
Taking a look at prices I think I’m leaning towards dual X5650’s and ~32GB but I’m not sure what model of RAID card I should be aiming for, or if getting any SAS drives is worth a damn considering this thing will probably just be streaming over the WiFi to the TV when it comes to media center content.