Looking to purchase an off lease server to put in the home lab as a storage server. My options are: HP DL180 G5 or Dell PowerEdge 2950 II. I will be using sata drives with the systems and just wanted to know if anyone recommends one over the other. Pros and cons to any of the systems, etc...
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Storage Server Recommendation - Home Lab
- Thread starter SychoSly
- Start date
Netwerkz101
Gawd
- Joined
- Jul 11, 2010
- Messages
- 661
Looking to purchase an off lease server to put in the home lab as a storage server. My options are: HP DL180 G5 or Dell PowerEdge 2950 II. I will be using sata drives with the systems and just wanted to know if anyone recommends one over the other. Pros and cons to any of the systems, etc...
PowerEdge 2950's are loud and consume good deal of power.
Child of Wonder
2[H]4U
- Joined
- May 22, 2006
- Messages
- 3,270
Don't waste money on 5+ year old junk. Just build your own box.
Are you constrained to only those two systems?
As Vader mentioned Synology makes good BYOD NAS, so does QNAP.
If you are able to build your own NAS solution, I highly recommend FreeNAS. It's open source, has great community support, and often times you can build a FreeNAS NAS for much cheaper than a BYOD solution. For example, I'm running a 20TB (8 x 4TB) RAIDZ3 box with an LSI controller, dual Intel GbE NICs, which with link aggregation that has great speeds. The whole thing cost me less than a BYOD solution.
As Vader mentioned Synology makes good BYOD NAS, so does QNAP.
If you are able to build your own NAS solution, I highly recommend FreeNAS. It's open source, has great community support, and often times you can build a FreeNAS NAS for much cheaper than a BYOD solution. For example, I'm running a 20TB (8 x 4TB) RAIDZ3 box with an LSI controller, dual Intel GbE NICs, which with link aggregation that has great speeds. The whole thing cost me less than a BYOD solution.
@OP
If this is for a lab environment (as opposed to a media server) why not look at a Dell C1100? They have 4 3.5" slots in the front which you can use for VM storage, and you can boot the storage OS from a USB thumb drive. Other variants have 6 or 8 (can't remember) 2.5" drive slots.
If this is for a lab environment (as opposed to a media server) why not look at a Dell C1100? They have 4 3.5" slots in the front which you can use for VM storage, and you can boot the storage OS from a USB thumb drive. Other variants have 6 or 8 (can't remember) 2.5" drive slots.
HP's G6 servers are cheap on eBay ($200-$300) and support DDR3. Don't waste your time on G5 or below. IMO the Proliant DL380 G6 is the best for your buck right now. DIY is obviously an option too, but you miss out on some of the really cool enterprise features (ILO)
I am not looking at NAS's as I don't want the system to be limited to just storage, which I should have mentioned in the first post.
Noise and cooling is not a concern for me as the system will be located in the basement utility room which is cool all year round and out of the way.
Is there a resource available that could tell me how much power the servers draw.
Dell 2950, HP DL180 G5, and HP DL380 G6
Noise and cooling is not a concern for me as the system will be located in the basement utility room which is cool all year round and out of the way.
Is there a resource available that could tell me how much power the servers draw.
Dell 2950, HP DL180 G5, and HP DL380 G6
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Depending on what parts you having laying around DL380 G6 - barebone build some assembly required.
Power consumptions depends on the components. I've had DL380 G6's draw less than 150w to over 350w depending on the procs, ram, hd, and IO cards. The 2950 III's I haven't seen draw less than 200w and ramp up to 415w. The only DL180 G6 I have is humming along at 335w with a bunch of 1TB midline drives.
X-series Xeons are faster but use a lot more electric, for at home most times the L-series work just as well and will save you a fair amount on the electric.
As always, you can always build it as well either new or of salvaged parts. My home file server is running an old inventec 4U chassis but it has 15xLFF hot-swap bays in it....couldn't pass it up at $20. Then ended up my last desktop motherboard/cpu/ram with and only had to purchase drives. Cheap, yes! Does it perform as well/look as pretty as some others....nope but for a home lab file server I could easily get away with a dual-core proc that is a few years old (140w will 5 drives in it).
Power consumptions depends on the components. I've had DL380 G6's draw less than 150w to over 350w depending on the procs, ram, hd, and IO cards. The 2950 III's I haven't seen draw less than 200w and ramp up to 415w. The only DL180 G6 I have is humming along at 335w with a bunch of 1TB midline drives.
X-series Xeons are faster but use a lot more electric, for at home most times the L-series work just as well and will save you a fair amount on the electric.
As always, you can always build it as well either new or of salvaged parts. My home file server is running an old inventec 4U chassis but it has 15xLFF hot-swap bays in it....couldn't pass it up at $20. Then ended up my last desktop motherboard/cpu/ram with and only had to purchase drives. Cheap, yes! Does it perform as well/look as pretty as some others....nope but for a home lab file server I could easily get away with a dual-core proc that is a few years old (140w will 5 drives in it).
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Vengance_01
Supreme [H]ardness
- Joined
- Dec 23, 2001
- Messages
- 7,712
Why not build your own white box?
You may be limited by raid controllers, an older server, 2950 say may only come with a perc 5i which can only handle up to 2TB drives, so that would be a limitation. You say you are not looking at NAS's because you want to do more then just storage, what else do you want to do? I've and 2900's with dual power supplies and 3-4 SATA drives, dual CPU's they draw a ton of power compared to a six or even 8 bay Synology or Qnap NAS and they take up to 4TB drives, and with firmware updates in the future, will likely accommodate larger drives down the road.
No, you won't. It is called IPMI and supported by many consumer grade server boards (e.g. Supermicro, TYAN).but you miss out on some of the really cool enterprise features (ILO)
Not as glorious as iLO, but does everything that an average user needs (i.e. remote console and virtual media).