DL180 Gen6 with a jumble of HDs, possible or not bother?

[BlizzardX]

So lets get this straight, power is half price, it's warm, stunning landscapes, not run by a tin pot dictator and isn't months away from self destruction? You'll be telling me you have a decent broadband infrastructure, reasonable employment rates and your laws reflect common sense rather than the whim's of butt hurt millennial ********** next!

To a certain extent yes, although I'm paying equivalent to London prices for a lot of things and property is expensive in Auckland. We're also getting fibre to the home @ up to 1 gigabit speeds for those that want it and truly unlimited data consumption. Its not a bad place

If you have access the Rx10 series from Dell for free, take them... The cost to get a newer one will be higher than the power consumption for several years by which time the v3/4 stuff will be cheaper! My homelab of Dell R1920w UPS, 2 x Dell R710s, Dell R310 SAN (running xpenology) with Raid F1 SSDs, and my SM X8 based server with 16 drive bays as my other xpenology general storage consumes around 450w per hour and costs around $40NZD per month to operate. They're not really that bad and as Avalon has pointed out the Dell R7x0 series can take a truck load of memory and really create a single all in one if you need.

 

[weird_dave]

Do I grab just the R710 or take the 3x R310's as well
I'll leave the poweredge 2900 though, it's a beast of a box.
I do acknowledge that the R710 isn't the best solution, it's probably better to just buy the Silverstone case and re-use a motherboard that's already running, the power saving of not running another PC will pay for itself in a year, unless I can migrate other stuff to it and not just use it for storage.

 

[BlizzardX]

What pcs do you have running and what roles/vms? You could grab the r710 and load it with memory and cores and run freenas/synology on it and create an all in one storage system that can run everything else.

 

[Avalon]

What pcs do you have running and what roles/vms? You could grab the r710 and load it with memory and cores and run freenas/synology on it and create an all in one storage system that can run everything else.

Or use something like Unraid, better VM/docker support and not bodged of Synology's code base and subject to upgrade issues as it has actual support - also designed to work with JBOD which fit's op's situation.

 

[weird_dave]

I'm still waiting on the specs, Mr IT guy at work is busy today so I may have to wait a bit, the HBA card is a while away yet so not a problem. The only PC I would be looking to remove would be the game server, though the power consumption is pretty low as not all the cores get used and I've lowered the core V as well. (not actually measured the power, but temps are low with the stock cooler, so there isn't a lot of heat/power).
OS choice is going to be the next decision, but that kinda depends on the specs, if it does become the game server then Win7 may have to win for ease of use. I've never been that struck on VMs, always felt sluggish, I do use one for some FPGA work (Xilinx solution to fixing their s/w for Win10 is to use a linux VM!)

 

[weird_dave]

Thought I'd update....
The SAS HBA card has turned up, but not the cables yet so I've not had a chance to play with it yet.
Meanwhile, corporate got involved and it's all got a bit long-winded to be able to procure a free R710, so I've relieved Mr IT guy of the hassle and gone for the Silverstone case with 8x3.5" backplane. I've also gone for some 4x2.5" in 1 5.25 as I am expecting an influx of those for free (without the corporate procedures getting in the way!), which means the SSD OS drives on my PCs will also not require direct sata connections, yay!
Total cost is nearing £200, but I've got 16 bays for that, I shouldn't run out any time soon