What Server?

_Kaiser_

Evening all,

Just thought I'd see what you guys might suggest for this.. I even have a story

2 years ago I decided to buy a dedicated "proper" server to house all my movies, TV, files and what not. I also bought myself a technet license and decided to use it as a learning exercise to get some more hands-on time with Server 2008 R2 and Hyper-V, VPN setup and so on (at the time I'd recently been laid off so had plenty of time to kill - unfortunately - and had never really had enough time to play with these things properly previously)

Anyway, as I'd always bought DELL kit for the job and having had several DELL PCs/laptops over the years, I went with a Poweredge 2950. Great machine, never gave me a days trouble but the noise wasn't practical for my home office setup.

So I sold it on and got a PE1900. Transferred the RAM, PERC 5 RAID controller and my 4 1.5TB SATA drives and all was well. Quieter machine, more expandability but it weighed a tonne and nearly killed me when I moved house!

In the interim I got a new job and got a Precision 690 cheap on eBay that I used as my main desktop (great machine actually, if also a little large/heavy)
Treated myself to a new laptop at Xmas so the PC was getting less use so I recently decided to sell the PE1900 and transfer the bits to the 690 - again all went well

But I have to admit it.. I miss the occasional blast of BF3 or Civ etc and while these will run on my laptop, they don't run great.

So I'm thinking of restoring my 690 to desktop status but what to get for a server... A PE2900 is cheap enough nowadays (seeing as I have most of the core bits already) but it'd weigh a tonne too and I'm no bodybuilder! :P

Ideally what I'd like is...

- Something about the size of the Precision 690
- Will take (preferably) 6 3.5" SATA drives but 4 as a minimum.
The plan would be to simply transfer the RAID card and disks and fire it up again, but I'd like the option of expanding the array too in the near future with 2 extra disks
- Supports Quad-Core CPUs.. preferably 2 of them as I have multiple VM's running
- Is reliable and won't wake the dead when it's running!!

Budget for (used) hardware: Maybe €300-400 ish

I've always used mostly DELL kit but would consider others if the reliability/features above are there.

So... any suggestions?

tech

I have 2 x PE 2850 's if interested.

_Kaiser_

tech wrote: »

I have 2 x PE 2850 's if interested.

Cheers for the offer but a rack server would leave me in the same problem I had with the 2950 - too noisy for an apartment!

Plus I'd probably be looking more 29xx series and above but appreciate it all the same

tech

no hassle best of luck with search

I now use a laptop with 12 gig ram and run Xen Server / ESXi works a treat!