Dell R710 Worth it?

[Gregzy97]

Hi all,

Found this deal on eBay, was hoping someone can give some advice on it, mainly, is hardware like this still worth it etc.

Dell Poweredge R710
2x Intel Xeon X5690 6C 12T 3.47GHz
16GB DDR3 RAM
6x 3.5" SATA/SAS bays
Included with 5x300GB 10k SAS drives
2x870W Gold rated PSU
Perc6/I RAID card
£199.99

I plan to either install Server 2016 and also run some VM's as well as running my unifi controller to remove strain from my desktop. Also hosting file sharing etc. Plex media server to handle some light transcoding.
OR
Install unraid/freenas as the base 'OS' and run similar as above.

Thanks in advance!

 

[pricklypunter]

You will quickly become frustrated with such a low quantity of RAM, your filer alone will likely want 12GB, so that will be the first thing you are buying for it, then there's storage to consider. You'll be wanting to add a good HBA to that, prolly an H210/ 310 would do you, and you'll be wanting more spindles, of higher capacity but lower RPM. Then there's the noise, power and heat to deal with. If I were you, I would be looking to source some good parts from the for sale/ trades forum and put something together yourself that is better suited for your needs
It does come at a cost, but buying good stuff that meets your needs now and for the foreseeable future will actually save you money and headaches up the road

 

[Gregzy97]

You will quickly become frustrated with such a low quantity of RAM, your filer alone will likely want 12GB, so that will be the first thing you are buying for it, then there's storage to consider. You'll be wanting to add a good HBA to that, prolly an H210/ 310 would do you, and you'll be wanting more spindles, of higher capacity but lower RPM. Then there's the noise, power and heat to deal with. If I were you, I would be looking to source some good parts from the for sale/ trades forum and put something together yourself that is better suited for your needs
It does come at a cost, but buying good stuff that meets your needs now and for the foreseeable future will actually save you money and headaches up the road

Thanks for that. I already have some RAM lying around from an old build that is DDR3 so i was planning to throw that in for a total of 24GB so that shouldn't be much of an issue. I also have a handful of 1TB 7200 SATA drives lying around for future upgrading, I don't see myself needing more than 6TB for the time being, and hopefully prices come further down by the time I need to expand.
I also managed to obtain a really cheap LSI 9211-8i flashed to 'IT mode', would this be any good?

I was going to build something specific to my needs, however sometimes it works out cheaper to re-purpose old server gear than being all individual parts, this was my thinking here considering the Xeon X5690's go for £85 each!

Thanks!

 

[nthu9280]

I don't know if you already have a rack or if you will be putting this in your home office. Need to watch out for noise, power draw and heat. That generation is little power hungry.

If this is going to stay in your living quarters, I'd highly recommend looking at Dell Precision / HP Z / IBM workstations which tend to be much quieter.

 

[Gregzy97]

I don't know if you already have a rack or if you will be putting this in your home office. Need to watch out for noise, power draw and heat. That generation is little power hungry.

If this is going to stay in your living quarters, I'd highly recommend looking at Dell Precision / HP Z / IBM workstations which tend to be much quieter.

I already have a rack and it is situated in a fairly cold storage room that is shut off from the rest of the house.

 

[Evan]

For your usage I would not buy it, something more modern and lower power would be much better I think for your needs, one of the more recent e3 based systems would do for what you plan to run I think. Or as mentioned an e5 single socket workstation.

 

[nthu9280]

LSI 9210-8i/9211-8i are similar to Dell H310. One thing to be concerned about the cheap LSI is he prevalence of counterfeit ones especially Chinese imports. You can validate the serial# with Brooadcom to be sure.

 

[ttabbal]

If you are OK with the power use, I think it would be fine for what you are doing. Perhaps more RAM, but try and see. Plan on about 100W idle draw. That's about where my dual X5675 rig runs. Power is reasonably priced in my area and I have solar offsetting the draw. So the difference in power for me is negligible.

I run proxmox as a filer, transcoding media server (emby), and a bunch of other things on it and it's never CPU or RAM starved. I have 96GB, but it's usually just used as cache for ZFS.