A bit of background before my main question:
My home lab currently consists of a Dell PowerEdge 2950 Gen III with Dual L5420's and 16GB RAM. It has an 8x2.5" backplane connected to a PERC 6/i that is occupied with 4x73GB 10k rpm SAS drives in RAID5 (where the esxi machine files and OS system drives are stored) and 4x1TB WD Red SATA in RAID10 (drives occupied entirely by 1 vmdk that's hooked to my media server). I like play with a lot of things and am pushing the limits of what this server can handle. Processing power has at times has been constrained but that's not usually the problem. The main problems are that it only accommodates 8 DIMMs (currently 8x2GB) and while it's only about $50 to buy 8x4GB on ebay, I don't think it's wise to put any more money into this considering that I'll run up against the RAM wall again in like 6 months. The other problem is that the largest affordable 2.5" drives available are 1TB. So getting anymore storage into this thing would require replacing the 4x73GB array with 4 more 1TB drives at a cost of ~$300. I've come to the conclusion that putting more money into this won't delay the inevitable long enough to justify the cost. In addition, I've recently added a Precision T3400 running Server 2012 R2 into my network to accommodate 4x3.5" 1TB drives in RAID10 as a iSCSI target (esxi as the initiator and passing the array to my media server). So, not enough drive capacity is the huge limitation here. To top it all off, the combined idle power draw of my equipment is somewhere around 350w and I'm don't feel like I'm getting nearly enough horsepower for it.
So, I apologize for the long winded life story but here's the question:
Is the C6100 at current prices still worth it? And considering how much cheaper it is, is the C6105 a better value? Here's the systems that I'm contemplating:
Dell C6100 C6105 Cloud Server 6X 1 8GHz AMD 6 Core Hex Core 96GB RAM 3X 250GB | eBay
I realize that this one is limited to 3 nodes and does not have the Intel benefit of hyperthreading, so 36 threads in total. But damn it's cheap! If I had a server that I needed 96GB for, I would buy this and scavenge the RAM and put it right back on ebay.
OR
Dell C6100 XS23 TY3 24 Bay 4 Node Server 8x E5520 QC 48GB RAM LSI MEZZANINE RAID | eBay
This one is obviously everyone's favorite. 32 cores, 64 threads and a lot of support resources here. But its got half the RAM and is twice the price. I can get 2 C6105s for the price of this one. I realize that cost per GB is greater for 2.5" drives, but I can cram a bunch of them in it.
And just for the heck of it, has anybody given one of these a try?:
HP Proliant S6500 4U 4X SL170S G6 8x Quad Core E5504 48GB Better Than C6100 | eBay
My home lab currently consists of a Dell PowerEdge 2950 Gen III with Dual L5420's and 16GB RAM. It has an 8x2.5" backplane connected to a PERC 6/i that is occupied with 4x73GB 10k rpm SAS drives in RAID5 (where the esxi machine files and OS system drives are stored) and 4x1TB WD Red SATA in RAID10 (drives occupied entirely by 1 vmdk that's hooked to my media server). I like play with a lot of things and am pushing the limits of what this server can handle. Processing power has at times has been constrained but that's not usually the problem. The main problems are that it only accommodates 8 DIMMs (currently 8x2GB) and while it's only about $50 to buy 8x4GB on ebay, I don't think it's wise to put any more money into this considering that I'll run up against the RAM wall again in like 6 months. The other problem is that the largest affordable 2.5" drives available are 1TB. So getting anymore storage into this thing would require replacing the 4x73GB array with 4 more 1TB drives at a cost of ~$300. I've come to the conclusion that putting more money into this won't delay the inevitable long enough to justify the cost. In addition, I've recently added a Precision T3400 running Server 2012 R2 into my network to accommodate 4x3.5" 1TB drives in RAID10 as a iSCSI target (esxi as the initiator and passing the array to my media server). So, not enough drive capacity is the huge limitation here. To top it all off, the combined idle power draw of my equipment is somewhere around 350w and I'm don't feel like I'm getting nearly enough horsepower for it.
So, I apologize for the long winded life story but here's the question:
Is the C6100 at current prices still worth it? And considering how much cheaper it is, is the C6105 a better value? Here's the systems that I'm contemplating:
Dell C6100 C6105 Cloud Server 6X 1 8GHz AMD 6 Core Hex Core 96GB RAM 3X 250GB | eBay
I realize that this one is limited to 3 nodes and does not have the Intel benefit of hyperthreading, so 36 threads in total. But damn it's cheap! If I had a server that I needed 96GB for, I would buy this and scavenge the RAM and put it right back on ebay.
OR
Dell C6100 XS23 TY3 24 Bay 4 Node Server 8x E5520 QC 48GB RAM LSI MEZZANINE RAID | eBay
This one is obviously everyone's favorite. 32 cores, 64 threads and a lot of support resources here. But its got half the RAM and is twice the price. I can get 2 C6105s for the price of this one. I realize that cost per GB is greater for 2.5" drives, but I can cram a bunch of them in it.
And just for the heck of it, has anybody given one of these a try?:
HP Proliant S6500 4U 4X SL170S G6 8x Quad Core E5504 48GB Better Than C6100 | eBay