Uses for servers?

[Rathion]

I may be getting my hand on several Dell 1850 Poweredge servers, so this begs the question once I have them, what do I do with them? I will only be able to supply them with small hard drives (60 GB at MOST)

 

[reflex99]

specs?

If they are nice enough, you could have a pretty sweet render farm

or folding farm

or sell them

 

[Rathion]

specs https://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/pe1850/en/UG/p1295aa.htm

Thats from dell, I won't know the specs of the ones I get until I get them in my hands.

 

[reflex99]

they look to be at least skt 771. So they probably are decently fast

 

[CrazyKiller]

How much are you getting them for? Actually, how much are you willing to part with them for?

 

[Ph?bus]

<- This guy?

 

[Rathion]

Depends on the specs I get them with. A family member works for a huge company and they give free stuff to the employees sometimes The last servers i got where ancient though >.<

Depending on the specs, $70 including shipping to $100+, all depends on what the specs are.

 

[Jubei]

What to do with them? Oh man, let me throw a list out there:

-Media server (although you'd want a big hard drive)

-If one has two nics, roll your own router

-Home back-up server (move any large external drives to it and share it with all the computers)

-Home phone server (http://www.maximumpc.com/article/how-tos/how_build_your_own_home_phone_server)

-Home automation (http://www.maximumtech.com/how-monitor-and-control-your-home-anywhere)

-Render farm

-Folding farm

-Ant farm (just to see who reads this far)

 

[Rathion]

Screw it, Home automation + a Ant farm, The ants can run my house for me!

What would the purpose of me running a render/folding farm be?

 

[reflex99]

if you render stuff, then a farm is useful

Folding for the cure man!

 

[eurocracy]

If you've got a good internet link, dedicated game servers. Lots of them.

 

[wewo]

can they be used as a desktop, If so I may get my boss to buy it for me for work, mine is old and slow, assuming you decide to sell.

 

[Rathion]

Oh I looked up folding, I might do that with one of them, might be pricey to run a bunch of them folding. And they COULD be used as a desktop but the form factor is designed for racks, not a desk, and they would be loud.

 

[Rathion]

Is it possible to run two external hard drives through USB or some sort of other interface and run them in RAID so they both are duplicates of each other in case the other fails and access them like a NAS.

 

[Ma$termind]

Is it possible to run two external hard drives through USB or some sort of other interface and run them in RAID so they both are duplicates of each other in case the other fails and access them like a NAS.

It's likely possible to set them up through some kind of software RAID-1 configuration. I've never heard of any hardware RAID controllers that work across USB, though.

As for using them as some sort of NAS device, I don't see why it would be any different than an internal hard drive within the server. You should be careful about the type of content you're trying to access, though, considering the bandwidth limitations of USB (2.0). I don't know how well it would keep up when trying to stream HD content, for example.

 

[Rathion]

Not necessarily USB, depending on what my connection options are, I may do something else.

 

[Rathion]

Whats to prevent me from popping in a PCI sata adapter and using two sata drives in raid?

 

[Ph?bus]

Whats to prevent me from popping in a PCI sata adapter and using two sata drives in raid?

Nothing.

 

[Rathion]

Beautiful.

 

[TacticalTuna]

Run astaro or pfsense on one as a sweet firewall

Host all your media to stream to whatever you want

Run VMware ESXi on it and have a bunch of OS's running at once


They do suck up power though, and are loud as anything.