Hi! I’ve never had a server, except for a raspberry that I use as a DNS (pi-hole), but I’ve been wanting it for a long time. The other day I found something that is kinda old, but very cheap, and I’ve been thinking about buying it since then.
It’s an IBM System x3500 M4. It has an E5-2620, 32 GB of DDR3, and 7 wonderful 900 GB SAS hard drives (don’t know if actual hard disk or solid state), which would fulfill all of my linux ISOs needs for at least the next year (probably a bit more), and a RAID controller ServeRAID M5110. All for 210 euros, which I think is very cheap.
From what I know, the E5 is power hungry for modern standards, and the SAS drives are not exactly friendly for replacement parts. How much would that (mostly the SAS part) be a problem?
Also, what can I expect concerning RAID? That is definitely the most concerning thing for me, as I’ve never worked with it.
Another huge part is, I do not care about accessing it from the outside, but I’d be sharing this system with my brother, in another city, so we would have to figure out a way of doing it. Normally I’d use port forwarding, but we’re both behind CG-NAT. Is there any way of not using a third party server as a proxy/VPN/whatever? If not, what service would you recommend for this purpose?
Another thing, my brother just happens to have a probably working, 16 GB ECC DDR3 stick laying around, except that it’s 1600MHz, and the CPU only supports up to 1333MHz. I’m pretty sure that if I’d put two sticks with different frequencies, the CPU would use the lower one, but is that the case even if the CPU does not support the frequency of one of the stick? (in short, would putting the other stick work?)
If you have any other pointers or anything, let me know. Thank you :)
Yeah, same.
I don’t know which version this 2620 is (they’ve been around since 2012), but any modern consumer CPU can outpace it by an order of magnitude - tho with fewer PCIe lanes (& possibly memory throughput, but not sure, maybe not), but it doesn’t sound like you need them.
Also idling makes quite a lot of difference even with cheap electricity bcs it’s 24/7 (eg 20 or 40 monies more a month on a rig that costs 200 monies either way is perhaps worth considering). Those “old” servers didn’t really power down much (CPU voltage + other parts, like server mobos, generally consume more power).
Also2, if important, making a quiet server is harder than making a quiet “PC server”.
Additionally to consider whatever the pro admin (closed sauce) tools the server has.
And this is just me, but I also don’t need RAID for my use case (and drive prices), for the same price as one HDD (a few years back that is) I would rather add that drive in an additional separate server/PC & have a backup system instead of just a backup drive (and it can be in a remote location in case of other emergencies/damages, like fire or whatever).
Old servers always seemed cheap but after thinking about it & the alternatives they’ve always seemed just fairly priced at the end. Which makes sense since it’s not noobs selling them, nor are they on fire sales/liquidation prices (they are sold by intermediaries in those cases).
So an old consumer PC (top of the line of the era if you like, or one of those corpo prebuilt machines), a good drive, and a good (efficient & safe) PSU is my usual homelab recommendation unless it wouldn’t cover very specific use cases).
Just for fun ballpark info:
- a 2620 (a hexacore from 2012) has a geekbench score of 390 (Single-Core Score) & 1902 (Multi-Core Score),
- an i3 12th gen (a classic quadcore from 2022 with a fraction of the power/heat, twice the max memory bandwidth) has 2147 (Single-Core Score) & 6766 (Multi-Core Score).