Anyone running an office server for home use, suggestions

**SimonMac** · 22 October 2015, 09:46

Originally posted by rl4engc View Post

Currently running an ancient Dell Precision P690 tower, but it's getting a bit long in the tooth now though it is a reliable old beast. I want to upgrade to something with later CPU's, was looking at the current Dell T620 etc. but they start getting a bit pricey, which I can't really justify for what I use it for (24/7 torrenting, media server (not transcoding), casual gaming). Any ideas?

Requirements would be something like:

- Support up to 8 3.5" SATAs (as I currently have 1x2.5" SSD System drive, 6x3.5" storage drives, not RAIDed
- not a blade server (bit too noisy)
- Max memory say 64Gb+

Or I'd consider a big tower desktop if there's one that can take the drives (I'm not adverse to just slinging them in if there's not enough racks, as long as it has the connectors)

Any ideas from /gen/ ?

Looking at your requirements you are massively over specced, you mention gaming but if you are running a server I assume you have a Server OS so that would rule out gaming.

I have a Late 2012 Mac Mini (2.5GHz) with 16GB Ram and a WD DL4100 NAS (4 x 4TB HDD), I havea few Virtual Machines running on the Mac Mini to handle Firewall/Web Proxy, the Mac Mini with Sonarr handles any TV shows that are missing on the NAS with iTunes running on the Mac Mini using the NAS as storage, Mac Mini also has OSX Server installed to handle a VPN so any device I have can connect home while I am working away. NAS has TimeMachine on it backing all my machines up while on the LAN (trying to play around with OpenVPN for a bridged VPN to allow backups while working away)

(It helps I am a massive Apple Fanboi as everything just works together)

**VectraMan** · 22 October 2015, 09:58

Can I have your old one? I have a Dell 390 Core 2 Duo with 4MB that I use for all that, and it is getting a bit slow.

**MicrosoftBob** · 22 October 2015, 10:00

Look around for HP microserver deals, a few times a year they do cash back offers that makes them very cheap

They normally need extra memory, and more storage but just fit your own

**vetran** · 22 October 2015, 10:15

could I suggest an HP microserver or similar (even a RPI2) you can add an external sata for extra drives that uses little juice and does all the server stuff and a separate turbo nutter desktop for gaming? Or just use a NAS for the 247 stuff. I have a Stora and D-link 320l nas that can do everything except gaming (D-link has the ability to load apps) and they use 10-40watts.

http://forums.dlink.com/index.php?topic=61456.0

other NAS's have apps as well but I found D-link best price (£50 bare) / performance.

http://www.dlink.com/uk/en/home-solu...rage-enclosure

£120.

You can lock it in an enclosure and pop on a cheap UPS. Or buy two and pop one in the shed (I have one in NODE 0 and one in the garden office I will copy between the two).

if you do it all in one it seems you are trying to make a bicycle fly.

**rl4engc** · 22 October 2015, 10:15

@SimonMac Yep although it's a server it's not doing much serving, this one is running Windows 7 Ultimate so I'd probably upgrade to Win 8, hopefully there's a slimmed down version out there without all the crap.

@VectraMan I'll probably just stick it on Ebay for collection only, unless I have a box and packing big enough by then. I think I paid £120 or £220 or something about 4 years ago so it'll probably go for < 100. I like the fact 16Gb of memory costs about £50.

@MicrosoftBob Yep I saw some deals on hukd, the only thing that puts me off is the "Micro"; it needs to be (are the terms Midi-Tower or Full-Tower still used?) to fit my existing drives in.

That did get me thinking though, why are computers in general so f00king big, there's no need for it. As far as I can see the limiting factors are the mechanical hard drives and physical connectors, if the drives could be scaled down to the size of a credit card, everything else (i.e. electronics) could be on tiny packages. You could get the equivalent of a big 4U rack mount in a box about the size of a games console I reckon.

**vetran** · 22 October 2015, 10:51

Originally posted by rl4engc View Post

That did get me thinking though, why are computers in general so f00king big, there's no need for it. As far as I can see the limiting factors are the mechanical hard drives and physical connectors, if the drives could be scaled down to the size of a credit card, everything else (i.e. electronics) could be on tiny packages. You could get the equivalent of a big 4U rack mount in a box about the size of a games console I reckon.

Once SSD overtakes spinning rust for price per gb and max size I'm sure that will happen.

**sal** · 22 October 2015, 11:06

Mixing a server and gaming desktop doesn't really work that well, been there, done that. One of the main set back you will face is the PSU which for servers is sized as low as possible to do the job. Meaning that in most cases it can't power mid-high end GPU. You can go the DYI way (as i did) and make your own spec. At some point you will realise that you don't want a 500W idle monstrosity running 24/7 only to act as a media streamer/file share/torrent client, so i ended up getting the HP Gen8 Microserver for the 24/7 bit. Cheap as chips for £99 after cashback, plus another £100ish for SSD, SD card and some RAM.

You can go with the bigger brother ML10 for even less £90 after cashback:
HP Tower Servers 814483-031 | Servers Plus

They are baby servers, that i wouldn't recommend for business use but well suited for home work. Any serious server with HW RAID, high end CPU and large number of disk bays will be way to noisy for home use, even if you ignore the price premium.

Only 4 3.5" Drive bays, but you can use the 2 5.25" with brackets or if you insist on having optical drive something like this:

Icy Dock MB343SP FLEX-FIT Trio 3.5" to 5.25" Front Bay Conversion Kit with Additional 2 x 2.5" HDD/S - 4711132869354 - Scan.co.uk

Or just keep 2 HHDs for the separate gaming desktop.

Small size disk drives already exist - they are called M.2 SSD
The 4U with the size of a console is called blade, it's a bit bigger than a console mainly to accommodate as much DIMM slots as possible

**b0redom** · 22 October 2015, 12:21

I use a couple of these at home. One for a NAS (FreeNAS and plugins) and one for a VMWare ESX server. Loaded with RAM they're very fast. No idea about gaming on one - should be fine as long as you can keep inside the power output envelope of the PSU I would guess.

Lenovo TS140 Intel Xeon E3-1226 V3 3.3GHz 8MB L3 Cache 1600MHz 1x4GB DDR3-1600 uDIMM 1 x 1TB 3.5" DC | Servers Direct

**rl4engc** · 22 October 2015, 12:24

Cheers for the ideas so far folks

@vetran
Would consider NAS, but this puts me off: 1) has the word 'cloud' in it, I'd want it purely local? 2) Goes on about RAID; if the NAS enclosure failed, I'd lose all data no? I'd just want to have NTFS formatted drives I could relocate? 3) TBH even with microserver I'd keep it on 24/7, Microserver+Ext.SATA could be an option.

Never heard of apps on a NAS, will look into it, but with my (3) above this might be moot.

Originally posted by vetran View Post

Once SSD overtakes spinning rust for price per gb and max size I'm sure that will happen.

Doubt it will never happen, as mechanical seems to be accelerating away; you can get a 4TB spinning disc for ~£100 or 40GB/£1, SSD is about 500Gb/£125 or 4Gb/£1

@sal

Hmm the HP servers could be the way forward I'm thinking, if there's one with low power consumption and space for drives.

Why can't graphics card manufacturers make a card that hardly uses any power when it's just idling? No need for 1024 GPU's to be running flat out if the monitor isn't even on, or just showing a windows desktop.

Anyone running an office server for home use, suggestions