Dell PowerEdge T20 Barebone server $149 Shipped

[Ducman69]

So I got mine and I'm going to be ordering the hard drives and RAM for it soon. What OS are people throwing on this for NAS duty?

Windows 10 is plug and play, install is very fast and everything just works. No drivers to download or anything. I have no stability issues with it, works great with Google Chrome Remote Desktop, and that way you can use any of the thousands of Windows applications with it which is nice since that's such a huge library.

I mostly just serve the files through Windows HomeGroup, and it also works for controlling my home cameras, some automation, misc. stuff like that as an always on machine, and is very stable. You can even schedule reboots once a week or so if desired, but I see no need.

 

[@dmin]

Try the steps on this page. That should solve your problem.

That worked, thanks! Werid issue, I'm guess this spare drive had a RAID config on it before?

For those that want to know this is what the chassis looks like.

 

[ir0nw0lf]

No, not three, four. It holds four 3.5" hard drives with no additional hardware needed.

You can expand it to hold an additional two 2.5" drives (like a couple SSDs) by purchasing a sata power splitter and dual-sata PCIe card.

I should have specified that the client was wanting three hard drives installed, was just making sure it was able to handle at least those three drives fine. My bad.

 

[rhouck]

FYI coupon says it expires today (YMMV):

Limited Quantity: Save additional $30 on PowerEdge T20 server! Limit 1

Expires Friday, March 18, 2016
$30 off the promo price of T20 PowerEdge order code bectc2. Non-transferable. Limited to order codes bectc2. Excludes electronics & accessories. Limit of 1 promotional item per customer. If more than 1 is ordered per address, then all orders will be canceled. Limited time offer. Limited quantity. Offer vaild untill 3/18/2016 11PM CST or until redeemed or while supplies last, whichever comes first.

I just ordered one, though the shittines off their website made me want to kill myself. It refused to complete checkout on Chrome. Then in Internet Explorer, I had to manually refresh every damn page along the way to get them to appear. I hope only one shows up at my doorstep, and not 16

 

[LazN]

Mine came in last week, with ECC ram. Though I upgraded to 16GB with two sticks, so the 4GB it came with is sitting unused for now. (to stay dual channel, not that it would really matter) I also put in a 120GB SSD to boot from and a pair of 3TB drives.

I put on the Server 2016 preview and it found all but the Intel Management driver, so I downloaded the 2012 version of that driver, extracted it, and had device manager find the driver in that folder. (I didn't want to install the full Intel management suite) I used Storage spaces to create a parity protected 2 drive space on the 3TB drives (so RAID 1 for now, but can upgrade without data loss)

I then put Hyper-V on it, and am running an Xpenology NAS in Hyper-V so that I can use Surveillance Station with my IP cameras.

Finally I got a pair of 10GBe el cheapo cards off ebay and a SFP ethernet cable for a total of just over $50 and the speed is such that it is as if the drives were local. (search ebay for MNPA19-XTR if you want those NICs and SFP-H10GB for the cable)
Both Windows 10 and Server 2016 had built in drivers for them. A quick host file edit to ensure I use the correct NIC to talk to the Dell T20, and finally a Jumbo Frame size tweak and I am running 10GBe to my main desktop.