I got the wrong thing!

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DiG

DiG

DiG

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Whilst on ebay the other evening I got a bit ahead of myself and purchased an HP DL360 G5.

The idea was that it would replace my ageing home built server that currently has 4 x 2 TB 3.5" SATA hard drives in it and is running Plex and a host of other stuff.

I thought I would just be able to plug in all the hard drives, install ubuntu and be off, however when the server arrived I found to my horror that the bays are 2.5"!

Can I just buy extra long SATA cables and keep the disks outside the server? Will the servers fancy RAID card mean I can't use ZFS as I am at the moment? Have I been an idiot buying stuff I don't understand? (Yes)

Sorry for such amateur questions, any help is appreciated!
 
Not sure I'd want the drives external and it won't be regular sata cables either.

What RAID card is it? For ZFS you'll want to crossflash of with the LSI IT firmware
 
Frozennova said:
Not sure I'd want the drives external and it won't be regular sata cables either.

What RAID card is it? For ZFS you'll want to crossflash of with the LSI IT firmware
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It's a P400, I've been looking at cables, I've found a SFF-8484 to 4 x sata cable, is this the kind of thing I would need? It doesn't have any power connections so I don't really understand how the drives would be powered!

Caged said:
Enjoy that volume.
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I had a bit of a shock when I first turned it on! It will live hidden away so noise isn't much of a concern
 
You'll need seperate power cables, pretty sure the p400 can be flashed.

I did my Dell sas 6/ir which is identical bar being dell branded
 
I would have bought something like a Dell Precision and installed a RAID card personally.

My Precision has a couple of quad core Xeons and 16GB of RAM and it cost me under £200 all in I believe... (I bought it with a single dual core and 4GB of RAM and upgraded with eBay parts)
 
Personally I would stick the DL360 back on ebay and pick up something a bit more appropriate - you shouldn't lose any money on it as the price on HP Server kit is fairly static in my experience

If you want to stay down the Server hardware route then probably be better to look for an ML350 G5 - same era and specs as the DL360G5, but some can be picked up with a 6x3.5" Hot Swap Backplane, and the 5.25" blanking plates that come fitted, have mounts for 3.5" drives - so potentially you could fit another 4/5 drives in there.

They are normally specced as Towers, but some of them were available "Rack-converted" with proper rack ears etc.
 
The old server is built out of old desktop parts, just doesn't have the power needed for Plex transcoding, this has 2 x Xeons and 16 GB of RAM and only cost me £120 so I thought it was a bargain! Clearly not quite as much a bargain as I thought.

Returning to ebay is an option but to be honest, if I can just get the hard drives connected then its perfect for what I need!

Frozennova - Thanks, I'll look up how to flash the RAID card in a bit, when you say separate power cables what kind of thing do you mean? The cables I have been looking at look like they would cover the whole connector on the backplane just for the SATA connectors
 
What you pay in power for this thing will quickly outstrip the savings on the purchase.
 
I just built an i5 server for plex, power draw is minimal and there plenty of Rack cases available at reasonable prices now adays. Older Xeon servers for power usage just dont make sense imo.
 
I just plugged it into a power monitor, 320 Watts! Ok so back on ebay then I think! Calliusmaximus what spec did you go for for your plex server? Is it handling transcoding ok?
 
For comparison a fresh out of the box DL380p Gen8 with two 300gb hard drives, 8GB ram and a single 6 core E5-2620v2 ticks over at 65W.
 
DiG said:
I just plugged it into a power monitor, 320 Watts! Ok so back on ebay then I think! Calliusmaximus what spec did you go for for your plex server? Is it handling transcoding ok?
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Yeah the G5 always was a bit greedy when it came to power. Was also ridiculously noisy. The G6 and later were much better on that front and almost silent in comparison.
 
DiG said:
I just plugged it into a power monitor, 320 Watts! Ok so back on ebay then I think! Calliusmaximus what spec did you go for for your plex server? Is it handling transcoding ok?
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Currently its running an i3 2100 or so, i have a spare i5 now.
On the I3 if its transcoding all 4 threads are maxed but i dont see any stutter etc. Its only because a colleague wants an i3 for his htpc decided to get an upgrade on ebay.

Ive used XBMC for a few years, but then we got a new samsung tv for the bedroom, so i decided to try Plex. Its truly is impressive , streamed by highest encoded film Avatar across the internet to my dads samsung tv and it worked great. Samsung TV's really are great with Plex and pretty much every other ondemand channel now, and i see Plex just released a new client for Xbox and Xbone which im sure for some people will be handy.
 
I have an I3 in my server build here I have ran plex on it once and it was fine it maxed the processor out but didnt have any issues. Not sure if it could handle two streams though. When all the hard drives spin down and its just idling / newsgrouping it pulls 60W. With all hard drives running and computing parity its 120W (thats 10 Hard drives and 2 SSD's an I3, 16GB RAM a SAS card and an expander card and 7 fans.)
 
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Thanks for all the advice, the thing that gets me is that 16GB of RAM almost costs as much by itself as the whole server did.

Plus I'd like to have IPMI as it's going to live in the loft and the cheapest motherboard I can find is a Supermicro model that costs £150.

Is consumer hardware still the best way or should I just spend more on a newer more power efficient server on ebay that has 3.5" hard drive bays?
 
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