Using a Refurbished Workstation as a NAS/File Server

Hardware
1

So I was browsing for refurbished workstations on eBay and I found a fairly decent bargain. It's a refurbished Dell Precision T5500 rocking a Xeon E5530 quad core @ 2.40GHz, 8GB of DDR3 RAM, 2x250GB HDD, Quadro FX1800 as well as on board gigabit Ethernet and the likes for a really decent price.

My question is, could I buy something like this and then throw in a few 1/2TB drives and maybe a decent NIC and have a reasonable NAS/file server or would there be more to it than that? Genuinely considering doing it for a personal project and would appreciate any input!

1 Like
2

You can use pretty much anything for a file server. It's only file systems like zfs which require a ton of ram but otherwise you can set up a file server on a toaster.

1 Like
3

Alright man! I might get something a lower powered for my file system project then and pick up this one for playing around with various Linux distributions and what not. Plus I'm kind of a hardware hoarder and it's such a good deal that it would be a shame not to pick it up.

1 Like