Hi all,
First-time poster here, I tend to lurk and look at threads for suggestions to buy things, but I thought I'd share what I bought on my own and found to be of great value.
I've never personally seen anyone post this on here, nor /r/Homelab, it's a fantastic deal for what you get;
They typically come in a SFF (8x 2.5" drives) or LFF (4x 3.5" drives) configurations.
They can take (most) Skylake generation Xeon/i-Series CPU(s). (i.e. e3-1240v5, or i7-6700)
They use DDR4 ECC UDIMMs, or non-ECC RAM (If you're using an i-Series)
They all have iLO onboard, although it shares a NIC with the host (no dedicated NIC)
Typically, they come with a HP P440 RAID controller. I put mine into IT mode, as I use ZFS, but if RAID is your thing it's an option.
Sometimes, they'll come with a HP 331FLR quad-NIC PCIe card (YMMV)
The power supply is rated for 460w, but personally I've never seen mine go over 200w, mine typically sits at 100w idle running a Minecraft server and a Windows 11 VM.
There's a bunch of goodies inside, internal USB, SATA if you don't want to use the RAID card, and it looks like it would support low-power GPUs for hardware transcoding based on the fans at the bottom, and the plastic shroud.
I've purchased both of mine from PCSP for ~$200 ea. I typically min-spec mine and buy parts on eBay to avoid paying more than I need to. They have a wee bit of an upcharge on their parts pricing compared to what I've found on eBay.
My first one runs 4x 512GB Intel DC SSDs in ZFS Z-RAID, and runs a Minecraft server, and my Windows 11 "hop-box" I use on the go.
My second one is a WIP, I'm planning on using a PCIe Bifurcation card to split the 16x slot into 4 NVMe drive slots. The chipset onboard supposedly supports it, and I found a few threads supporting the idea in various places, figured I'd give it a shot. It's going to run some higher-intensity applications, mostly a Citrix XenApp/XenDesktop lab.
In the end, not a bad system for $200 configured. Put another $100ish into it and you've got a decent server.
Thoughts?
First-time poster here, I tend to lurk and look at threads for suggestions to buy things, but I thought I'd share what I bought on my own and found to be of great value.
I've never personally seen anyone post this on here, nor /r/Homelab, it's a fantastic deal for what you get;
They typically come in a SFF (8x 2.5" drives) or LFF (4x 3.5" drives) configurations.
They can take (most) Skylake generation Xeon/i-Series CPU(s). (i.e. e3-1240v5, or i7-6700)
They use DDR4 ECC UDIMMs, or non-ECC RAM (If you're using an i-Series)
They all have iLO onboard, although it shares a NIC with the host (no dedicated NIC)
Typically, they come with a HP P440 RAID controller. I put mine into IT mode, as I use ZFS, but if RAID is your thing it's an option.
Sometimes, they'll come with a HP 331FLR quad-NIC PCIe card (YMMV)
The power supply is rated for 460w, but personally I've never seen mine go over 200w, mine typically sits at 100w idle running a Minecraft server and a Windows 11 VM.
There's a bunch of goodies inside, internal USB, SATA if you don't want to use the RAID card, and it looks like it would support low-power GPUs for hardware transcoding based on the fans at the bottom, and the plastic shroud.
I've purchased both of mine from PCSP for ~$200 ea. I typically min-spec mine and buy parts on eBay to avoid paying more than I need to. They have a wee bit of an upcharge on their parts pricing compared to what I've found on eBay.
My first one runs 4x 512GB Intel DC SSDs in ZFS Z-RAID, and runs a Minecraft server, and my Windows 11 "hop-box" I use on the go.
My second one is a WIP, I'm planning on using a PCIe Bifurcation card to split the 16x slot into 4 NVMe drive slots. The chipset onboard supposedly supports it, and I found a few threads supporting the idea in various places, figured I'd give it a shot. It's going to run some higher-intensity applications, mostly a Citrix XenApp/XenDesktop lab.
In the end, not a bad system for $200 configured. Put another $100ish into it and you've got a decent server.
Thoughts?