Cheapo Server, good buy?

Muel

Muel

Muel

Soldato
Joined
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Sheffield
Just bought a cheap system/bundle from a guy at work:

  • Antec Sonata 2 Case (Black, all I really care about)
  • 450W PSU (Antec so it'll be fine?)
  • Asus P5V-VM motherboard
  • Intel Pentium D 820 (2.8ghz dual core)
  • 1gb DDR2 (I had a matching DIMM, so added another as soon as I got it here).

There was a sound card and graphics card as well, but these are being sold. Paid £50 for it, thought it sounded a bit cheap. Good snappage? It will only take 1 SATA2 drive though so will need a RAID controller when I buy hard drives for it, which won't be for ages considering the current price. (Got a 120gb IDE drive for now, it'll do for running a web server and a Minecraft server).
 
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Aye, 95w TDP. But it's better than leaving my desktop on 24/7. (Idles at around 200w).

It's only a starting point after all. I know Ubuntu Server fairly well having run a VM for the last year or so for web dev, but never had a proper server so I've got a lot to learn yet.
 
Seems very expensive to me considering you could have had an entire new HP Microserver for £100 (after cashback).

And they idle at around 50W for the whole system (15W max TDP for the CPU).
 
Cheapest I can find one for is about £200?

It's not supposed to be a low powered file server anyway, it's a starting point that I'm going to upgrade around. For another £50 I could change the motherboard and RAM and it would have 8gb of DDR3.
 
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Muel said:
Cheapest I can find one for is about £200?
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They currently are on offer with £100 cashback, so yes, £200 but with £100 back from HP in the form of a cheque.

Plenty powerful enough, and upgradable. Mine's getting a Radeon 6570 and a dual port gigabit NIC tomorrow, plus the two SSDs it has as it's boot volume, and the two 2TB disks it has for storage, it makes for quite a powerful little box.

It will run rings around the box in your OP for everything bar possibly encoding, but then you shouldn't be media encoding on a server anyway.
 
Cheapest I can find one for is about £200?
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The updated 1.5GHz version is available for about £240 Including Vat. You can then claim £100 cash back from HP.

There may be some of the other 1.3GHz versions still available for a bit less. These should also still qualify for the cash back.

It's not supposed to be a low powered file server anyway, it's a starting point that I'm going to upgrade around. For another £50 I could change the motherboard and RAM and it would have 8gb of DDR3.
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In the benchmarks I've seen the processor in the 1.3GHz version of the Microserver is about equivalent to a Pentium D 3.0GHz.

The motherboard you have should support some of the earlier Core2Duo processors. You’d get a decent performance boost and reduced power consumption/heat.
 
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They look great, but they cost at least double what I paid.

I bought this mainly for the PSU and the case, the rest of it can be sold off immediately for a profit by the looks of the prices these bits are fetching on Ebay.

I won't be sticking with 775 on this. When it comes to motherboard upgrade time I'll grab some form of quad core CPU (possibly 6/8), and 8/16gb of RAM at the same time.

Eventually I hope to use it to host mini LAN parties. At the moment I've got it running a Minecraft server, and it seems to tick along rather nicely.
 
Muel said:
They look great, but they cost at least double what I paid.
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You want to spend another £50 upgrading the motherboard and RAM, plus whatever it will cost to get a CPU in there that isn't crud? Then you say you want a SATA RAID controller (proper SAS one onboard the Microserver, takes 4 hotswap drives)? This "Cheapo Server" is neither cheap, a server, nor particularly useful.

Sounds more expensive for worse hardware to me.
 
As already stated, this is simply a starting point. If I went out and built a £600 server today, it would still cost me £600 and I'd buy all the wrong stuff. By running this and upgrading over time (as the prices drop, which they always do over the years), I'll spend less, learn more and get the right stuff for me.

If I only spend another £50 on it, you're completely right, it would be worse spec for more money, but you can't get the kind of spec I'm thinking of upgrading to into a microserver, plus 4 hard drives is my bare minimum (4x2tb in RAID5).
 
And the microserver takes 4 HDDs, so that's not really a problem?

The problem you have is that nothing you have bought is anything close to resembling "server" grade parts, so in esscense your starting point is no hardware and -£50.

Not exactly sure what your "spec I'm thinking of" is, but for what it's worth, I built two dual processor, dual-core opteron servers, with 3ware hardware-accelerated, (backup battery included) SAS/SATA RAID controllers, 8Gb/s of fibre channel interconnectivity, and 14 HDDs (two for OS in RAID1, 12 on the RAID card in RAID 50) for less than £400 (granted the disks are only small as I was only proving a concept), and that included my fibre channel switch.

All that was on proper server-grade hardware, in server-grade chassis.
 
What I've bought does the job for now, and once I've sold the bits I don't use, it'll have cost me £20. Maybe once I've bought the HDDs and had it running for a few months I'll decide a microserver is enough for what I want, in which case the rest of this server can be split and sold off for a profit.

Or maybe a full on server (like you built) is what I want, in which case again, HDDs are available and I can sell the rest off at a profit.

Or (most likely), I'll end up deciding that a desktop motherboard, an i5 and 8gb DDR3 is what it needs, in which case that upgrade path is open as well.

Out of interest, what are the leccy bills like when comparing proper server hardware and servers built with desktop hardware?
 
For 50 quid, who cares and it's a start :)

...but I would have told him 'i'll take it off your hands' as opposed to 'i will pay you actual money for this single-drive, aged, noisy, server'
 
Exactly. I might be £50 down, but there's a new toy on my desk and I can sell it for a profit if I get sick of it, or upgrade it.

It's got 3 drives in at the moment. Only 1 is connected though. It is indeed old, but it's actually very quiet! All the HDD bays are rubber mounted, and it came with an aftermarket CPU cooler. The PSU is very quiet, and it has no case fans. (Doesn't need them, runs nice and cool).
 
Muel said:
Out of interest, what are the leccy bills like when comparing proper server hardware and servers built with desktop hardware?
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Depends on what your "proper server" consists of. The Microserver pulls around 45W when idling, as the CPU is a low power (15W part), obviously this depends on if you have any sleep/spin-down settings on the disks, how many disks you have, and if you have any power hungry PCIe cards present.

The opposite end of the scale would be say a quad nehalem-based Xeon system, with 64GB+ of RAM and 4-5 15,000 RPM SAS disks with no power-saving at all. You'd be lucky to see change from 600W on a setup like that.

Your Pentium D was a high power-draw CPU, even by todays standards, so I'd expect that machine to come firmly inbetween the two examples above, costing a good 2-3 times (at least) more to run than the Microserver.
 
It'll save me a fair bit of money over my old setup though. I had my desktop on 24/7 doing stuff, that idles at about 250-300w.

High-draw? It's only 95w. I'm used to a 140w AMD 965BE, and that's overclocked with no power saving enabled. :P (Because CnQ makes it crash).

It'll do for now. When I can afford the HDDs to upgrade it that'll be the first thing, after that I can decide whether it's the high performance or the low power draw route.
 
Muel said:
Just bought a cheap system/bundle from a guy at work:

  • Antec Sonata 2 Case (Black, all I really care about)
  • 450W PSU (Antec so it'll be fine?)
  • Asus P5V-VM motherboard
  • Intel Pentium D 820 (2.8ghz dual core)
  • 1gb DDR2 (I had a matching DIMM, so added another as soon as I got it here).

There was a sound card and graphics card as well, but these are being sold. Paid £50 for it, thought it sounded a bit cheap. Good snappage? It will only take 1 SATA2 drive though so will need a RAID controller when I buy hard drives for it, which won't be for ages considering the current price. (Got a 120gb IDE drive for now, it'll do for running a web server and a Minecraft server).
Click to expand...

I can see where your coming from... and reckon you got a good buy at the end of the day. Win lose or draw. It does the job, you can adapt and expand or flog it. It's the route I'm currently exploring to fill these long winter nights.

I can also see the attraction of the HP ProLiant Microserver G7 N40L deal currently running and a 4 bay server at about 140 notes after cash back can't be sniffed at :D Although supporting only RAID 0 or 1 seems to be a bit limiting, and no hot swap. Does it support array re build in case of drive failure? Not certain. I'm asking because I'm a server noob :)

Certainly seems to be a vast range of these little ready to go NAS/Microservers on the market at the moment. If your a newbie, like me, and not got access to pre flood priced high capacity drives your *****d both ways.

EDIT

Just spotted the HP Microserver thread so I'll trawl through that for the answers :)
 
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I can't see the point of running old hardware for a server any more.

I had an ML110 G3 for a few years, but when you consider the power consumption, it just seems silly - it really does have a noticeable impact on your electricity bill.

I'm incredibly tempted by the HP Microserver, not just for the electricity (I currently serve files/steam media from my SB PC, which appears to idle at around 80W, so not a lot to be saved there), but for the reduced noise levels as well.

I guess it depends on your setup and your usage. For me, a Microserver would mean only having to turn my PC on for playing games really - I have a MBP and iPad for browsing etc.

I'm curious, what PC do you have that you think idles at 200W? That seems rather high to me.
 
The biggest draw for me to this is to learn and spend very little. an HP Microserver would cost me £100 for no gain whatsoever to me, as I doubt very much this server will add £100 a year to my electricity bill, especially as I leave it off most of the time. (Unless I'm wanting to leave my trees to grow on Minecraft).

Desktop is a 140w AMD 965BE with no power saving enabled, because it crashes when it is, 2x4gb RAM, 2x ATI 5830s and 2x Samsung F3s. The 5830s alone can pull 175w each I seem to remember. I'd say at least 200w, seeing as the CPU is pulling 140w constantly on it's own. :P
 
If you wanted something for 24/7 use a HP Microserver would pay for itself relatively quickly. If you’re just after a box to experiment with the power consumption isn’t going to matter very much.

You appear to be quoting the TPD figures for the processors. This won’t directly translate to the power consumption measured at the wall.

For reference power wise…

My only 24/7 server is the guts of a PE840 in a PE1600SC chassis running SBS 2011. It has a Q6600, 8GB of ram, PERC5/I, 4 x 150 Velociraptors (RAID10), and 3 x 2TB ‘green’ drives. It pulls about 130W at the wall (about £115/year on my current electricity tariff).
 
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