Home Server advice :)

illuminateme said:

check your local craigslist and check out whats available... dell are usually nice, you should find some with 24GB ram and up in your price range

oh yah they are NOISY

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TweetTweet said:

ok. i was looking at a refurbished dell off ebay. (i'm not a fan of craigslist transactions.) It doesn't have any drives though. Can i start with one drive and the server, then scale up from there?

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illuminateme said:

consider the shipping and customs cost as well... my CL seller have been nice enough to demo the machines before the transaction and the pricing is better than online

i would recommend getting ones with hard drives included, as they are not consumer drives, they are much more expensive when you buy them separately. not to mention the time researching compatibility.... when i had 1 drive fail out of the whole array, i just yank it out and it just kept humming along.... =P

depending on your workload, you may consider weaker cpu for more ram and storage as even an older xeon can handle much more threads than modern lower end cpu

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illuminateme said:

check your local craigslist and check out whats available... dell are usually nice, you should find some with 24GB ram and up in your price range oh yah they are NOISY

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bluehatface said:

I second illuminateme's suggestion to look for a used Dell server.

As an alternative to a full blown server, why not look for a used workstation? You can probably get a used Xeon machine for that price which is server grade so-to-speak. Multiple cores, ECC memory and RAID drives in a much smaller form factor, lower power, lower noise, and you should be able to use other mostly consumer parts. It's going to be pretty much the same if you're just throwing a single Linux OS on there.

What are you using the server for? You do miss out on features such as dual PSU etc., but it doesn't really matter if you're not mission critical.

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