I’ve got an old Intel i5 750 (16 PCI-e 2.0 lanes) on a Dell motherboard (54KM3)
Mobo has two PCIe connectors (one x16, one x1) and 4 SATA ports. I’m pretty sure PCIe bifurcation isn’t supported on it
What would you use to fill those two slots up?
Is a 2.5Gbit NIC an option on the PCIe x1 slot? Could I even get anything close to 2.5Gbits if I install such a card?
Are PCIe to SATA/SAS boards an option for expanding storage?
Would you recommend Unraid or something else to manage this ‘server’?
Are the boards plug-and-play? Do I need drivers?
Not the answer you want but recycle it. It’s ancient, very likely unreliable by now and very inefficient hardware. Exactly what are you planning to connect to it anyway and how do you plan to server data (NFS/SMB)? Pretty much anything will run circles around it to not mention in terms of power efficiency.
^^^^ Agreed. Although it may still work now, there’s no guarantee it’ll do so for the next decade. Effectively, it’s e-waste. Especially as it’s Dell anyway
As for your storage server, there’s a few alternatives:
Hunt for a cheap-ish mainboard+CPY+RAM set with the X97 chipset on Aliexpress/ebay/whatever is local to you
Find a used workstation from Dell/Lenovo/HP/IBM and add storage
Build new on the EPYC 3000 SoC platform. I’d recommend the Gigabyte MJ11-EC0 board. Comes with a 3151 EPYC SoC already installed, all you need is storage and RAM. And a case+PSU, of course I have one, not cheap as such (until you realise there’s an EPYC CPU+cooler and IPMI included in the price!) and with a MiniSAS 8654-4i to SATA adapter cable you can have a total of 8 SATA-III disks. (4x directly from the chipset, 4x from the 8654-4i port)
In all cases, add some used and/or new HDD’s (actual storage) and an SSD/NVMe drive for the OS and some caching.
Please do not “recycle” good working parts regardless of age or usefulness (to you) without first attempting to sell or re-home. When electronics are recycled most end up being mechanically separated for scrap materials, of which most is also thrown out.
Reduce, Reuse, and then recycle when all other options are gone. There is probably someone out there right now waiting for an i5-750 to pop up for a reasonable price.
Most likely a waste of money since it doesn’t do AES-NI if you’re planning to do SMB, it might be able to push 2.5Gbit but early (ancient) PCI Express Gen2 will likely show interesting compatibility issues
Depends on who you ask but usually fine if you’re using spinning rust
There are 2.5 gigabit ethernet PCIe 1x cards. First gen i5s are PCIe gen 2, which is 5GT/s per lane, so theoretically you could get full performance out of it. There could be bottlenecks somewhere, but I think it could work.
Yes. You probably want an HBA, as that will ensure that the operating system has full access to the drives. The most cost-effective option is still probably to get an older SAS raid card that can be flashed to HBA mode, and flash it. Then purchase cables so you can use it with sata or sas drives, depending on what drives you have.
Unraid, TrueNas, and OpenMediaVault are all good options. Look into what type filesystem and what (if any) type of array you want to set up, and that would help guide you on what OS to pick.
If you want to get into using Linux, then jumping in the deep end and using a “normal” Linux distribution is also a good option. The learning curve is steeper, but at the end you have a much more flexible system and knowledge that is widely applicable on Linux.
Anytime I use old hardware I try to run an OS with minimal overhead. Why not get an HBA for sata/sas expansion, try a 2.5 nic if needed, and run zfs on debian or Ubuntu server.
Depends on what else the server is going to be doing. A lightweight GPU for transcoding isn’t the worst thing to have in a fileserver. Both slots do have options for additional networking and storage, but options for pcie x1 SATA cards tend to be slim. I have a PCIE 1x 8port card that’s PCIE2.0, and uses port doublers for 4 pairs of ports, resulting in some pretty heavy limitations on performance when accessing multiple drives. On the other hand, options for multi-port network cards on PCIE x1 are also pretty slim and face similar limitations.
There’s also the possibility of using the 16x slot for a NVME adapter card or PCIE flash accelerator. Depending on how you configure your NAS, these could help to improve performance, but I haven’t really experimented much with that.
Is a 2.5Gbit NIC an option on the PCIe x1 slot? Could I even get anything close to 2.5Gbits if I install such a card?
It should be perfectly fine. In fact, I think RLT8215B is a PCIE 2 adapter, despite being fairly new. Not sure about i225 chips. Both can be gotten extremely cheaply.
Are PCIe to SATA/SAS boards an option for expanding storage?
Absolutely. Do it.
Would you recommend Unraid or something else to manage this ‘server’?
Whatever you’re comfortable with. You could even install Windows and just share drives over a network to other Windows machines. There are advantages and disadvantages to different options depending on what you plan to use it for, but generally speaking, they’re all more or less fine for connecting to individual drives over a network.
I’ve never personally used unraid, but I remember it being popular a long time ago, and then supplanted by opensource alternatives like freenas or trunas.
Are the boards plug-and-play? Do I need drivers?
Depends on the operating system and board. Linux sometimes needs firmware blobs in order to load drivers for some cards, Windows often needs drivers from the vendor to be installed. Many sata cards are generic enough that the drivers will already be present.
Personally, I just have a desktop linux distro with various ZFS drives. The hardest part was figuring out how to get network shares working for NFS/SMB.
before u thinking about getting a 2.5gbit nic for this ancient piece, maybe look if your network support it. depending on which drives you will use, it can be a waste of money. i mean if u dont planning on getting ssds or some kind of raid for normal hdd, it can never saturate this nic. sure, often u can get more then gbit speed for large files, but i dont think it is worth it.
often linux distro dont need specific drivers for older hardware, maybe if u installing those non-free firmware packages u can get more features (that arent requiered) to work like proper c-states and or hardware accelration for integrated graphics if u want to transcode.
if u just wanne play around with it and getting some expierence with setting things up, sure, it can work. but dont expect it will laster longer when this is turned on 24/7 likely. ive googled the board and it was listed for 50bucks on ebay, maybe it is worth to think about to sell this old desktop and get more modern hardware. like the guy before said hardware encryption by the cpu is not aviable. dunno if smb needs this to performe. i can imagine the cpu is bottlenecking at gbit speed.
maybe some cheap i3 or amd apu will work better for your needs, but for starting to get the software known your dell can work.
My best quess would be no.
I wouldn’t count it working even at 1 Gigabit. If you are running unreaid/Truenas, it is based on freebsd or linux. As far as I know, it should be mostly plug and play, but if the driver isn’t there, it is going to be a pain. For context, I haven’t had any issues with my IBM X3550 M3 with linux but your experience may vary quite bit.
I personally have only worked with truenas. But most of this is going to apply to unraid as well.
You are going to need an boot drive, and that is most likely going to take up one of your SATA slots. The rest can be allocated to spinning rust (Spinning rust==HDD).
I haven’t worked with that case. But it is adviced that you don’t just leave the HDD laying around. I would advice mounting them, and I don’t know that case/setup.
Power efficency
For sure, it is not going to be efficent compared to newer hardware. But the most critical part for you is going to be idle power consumption. That is the time that the server sits there waiting for you to request a file etc. With my servers that is around 100-150W and that adds up quicly to your power bill.
Remember, you are the only one who should make desicions on what you want to do. I cannot advice for the adding of the 2nd NIC (Network interface card), since it is going to be unlikely you can take full advantage of the 1 gigabit connection I assume you have on board.
For software, truenas scale and core are free to use, so you can try it out for yourself. Add couple of HDD as the mass storage and try it. And use ZFS, since you are using old hardware. If something dies, you might be able to recover at least some of the data off it.
If all you want to use it for is backup storage, then it should be fine, but if you’re looking to use it as PLEX or a media server, it would be rather underpowered.
They do sell PCI x1 2.5g cards, I haven’t personally used one, so I cannot say at what bandwidth you’ll see out of it.
PCI to sata/sas are an option, but you need to make sure it’s on the list of devices that will work with Unraid if you’re going that route.
