HP DL180G6: potential cheap purchase for use as a Xpenology NAS

Soldato
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Auckland, New Zealand
Hi,

I've been offered a HP DL180G6 with 40w Xeon 5600 series cpu and 6GBram. I believe it is the 8 bay version, but I'm waiting for confirmation. I'm interested in using this as a Xpenology (Synology DSM on non-Synology hardware) as it has hotswap bays, decent ram and enough horsepower built in.

I'm currently using an Atom D510 supermicro board in the current xpenology build which idles at around 80w with the hdds spinning, so I suspect given my Dell R410 with same CPU draws 60w at idle would produce similar power draw.

My questions are related to increasing the 3.5" capacity from 8 to 12 bays and also the backplane:

From what I can tell, you can swap out the 4/8/12 backplanes and cage for either of them and also add in the 25 bay 2.5"... Is this correct, so if I got a 4 or 8 bay version I could purchase the cage and backplane from ebay for example and just swap them out with no other requirements?

In addition, I've noticed that the backplane only has a single SAS connector for all of the 4/8/12 drive slots, how does this work? Does the backplane act as a SAS expander? How many drives could get through that single connector before it exceeds 6G speeds, assuming you have an HBA that works at that speed?

Finally, how noisy are they? They're 2u which means they run bigger fans than a 1u. I've got a Dell R410 and in my rack and outside of the main living areas I cannot hear it even though it has 15000rpm fans, how much quieter would it be?

Any answers, thoughts or comments would be appreciated.

Cheers,

Chris
 
Yeah I've read a lot about their audible qualities... I was wondering if they would act like my Dell 1u server which is quite quiet, but they don't. The simple reason for the unit was the ability to turn it into a 12 bay 2u rackmount system for cheap... Living in New Zealand means that getting chassis second hand are cheap from Ebay but the shipping costs are so high that it is not economical, hence looking at the second hand built server market.

the inability to reduce the fan 'volumes' and also that the backplane is only 3g for SATA is a no go!
 
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