So I got some servers

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So for an xmas present my dad got me some dell servers from his work. Theres 3 Dell PowerEdge R610’s and 2 R510’s. I’m not completely sure what I’m going to do with them, or at least one of them. I think I only want to keep one since they take up so much space and honestly I can only use 1 at a time.

All of them are equipped with 2 x Xeon X5655’s, the 610’s are equiped with 96GB of ram and no drives (slim sas), and the 510’s have 24GB of ram and full drive bays (full size sas, 600GB each). It looks like they were configured to be a render farm because the 610’s are all in compute mode with the 510’s set up as storage. I assume they have something of a poor man’s super computer at that metal shop.

I think I want to keep a 510 and get it up to a full 64GB of ram (the 610’s have 8GB DIMMs in them) and make it a NAS. I dunno if I’m going to sell them or keep them until I move and make a huge neural net. I might do the cluster project with them… But again I’m not sure. Its uniform hardware though so that makes that part easy.

Ironically these have the processors I’d need for a Mac Pro 5,1 upgrade so I might keep 2 just in case, I dunno.

Any ideas?

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I hope you have good Uniruptible Power Supplies protecting them. I would use them to set up a Nas, a virtual machine server, and maybe use the parts from one and build a Hackintosh.

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There were some UPS but they were a billion pounds and mostly dead. I didn’t feel like dealing with them.

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Out of curiosity, what sort of metal shop? Could be render, could be computational for material properties, toolpath calculation if there’s a lot of CNC programming involved, etc.

Sounds like fun stuff to have around though.

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Keep the 610’s and ditch the 510’s.

There’s actually a whole thread about this on /r/homelab but I can’t remember it off the top of my head.

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Pshh, my dad never gets me like $1,500 in servers for Christmas.

Cool! I’m sure you’ll have some fun with those. I’d make a local NAS for media and local files and then set another one up as a synced storage solution so I didn’t have to rely on Google Drive/Dropbox/whatever else when I wanted to remotely move files. As for the other 3? That’s too many servers for my skills and creativity.

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Both. They have to CAD the models, then run them in virtual stress tests.

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FEA analysis! Always fun but a pain to set up.

Neat!

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Atm I’m tryitg to figure out how to put a gpu in the thing. I’m keeping a 510 because I actually hawe drives. The 610’s don’t have drives at all.

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If everything goes ‘wrong’ with installing a gpu there’s always riser cables and some small powertool tricks. Congratulations with the servers btw.

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…switch the drives around?

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R610 uses alim SAS drives. R510s are full size SAS drives.

I would look at the cost of Slim SAS and see if it is in your budget. The 610 is the better hardware.

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Its full size vs laptop size. There is no switching around.

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…How? It has less PCI slots, same processors, same ram…

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If you want to make a NAS, more RAM is a good thing.

If you had other things that you valued over a NAS like PCI hardware pass through, then yes, I concure.

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Well I’d only use like 3 or 4 drives for a NAS TBH.

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Sata drives can be used with a sas controller normally, there might be a setting in the bios that needs changing, but one thing to know is you can’t mix was and sata.
But you could get done cheap sata sass and they would work pretty well.

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Personally, I always prefer more RAM in a server due to running VMs and exotic redundant file systems. I am also a fan running servers with a RAM disk as well so PCI connectivity is not really that high on my list. Thread Ripper and Epyc are starting to change my mind though.

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Look at it this way. I’m one of those crazy people that run DE’s on servers and have xtogo installed :stuck_out_tongue:

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Are they delidded?