Quiet Rackmount Server

[DBordello]

I am looking for a nice quiet server for the home. It will be in the utility room, so it doesn't have to be silent, but it is next to the theater room. Rackspace is not an issue. I am looking for something reasonably powerful (thinking 32 GB of RAM, etc.), to run a few miscellaneous VMs. As always, nothing that will break the bank.

Any good used solutions (Dell, HP, etc.) that can be picked up on eBay? I know there are plenty of good options out there, but most are loud.

Or, am I best off building my own? Perhaps grabbing a 4U case, a quiet PSU and a quiet CPU cooler?

Thoughts?

 

[Patrick]

Reasonably powerful like 4 core? What will it be doing? Any video transcoding?

The other big driver now is how many drives and what size? e.g. 24x 3.5" drives or 2x 2.5" drives.

 

[Stanza]

Poweredge R310

Mine is damn near silent.

.

 

[DBordello]

Reasonably powerful like 4 core? What will it be doing? Any video transcoding?

The other big driver now is how many drives and what size? e.g. 24x 3.5" drives or 2x 2.5" drives.

A Quad core E3 or something would be more than enough. I don't anticipate any video transcoding. For now, not much major storage. 2 x 3.5 or similar should be fine.

 

[DBordello]

Poweredge R310

Mine is damn near silent.

.

The R310 looks nice. It is cheap, and it is quiet. However, I am looking for something with a little more umph. It seems most come with 4GB of RAM.

 

[Patrick]

The R310 looks nice. It is cheap, and it is quiet. However, I am looking for something with a little more umph. It seems most come with 4GB of RAM.

RAM is extremely easy to install.

 

[Stanza]

I swapped mine from

I3-530 with 8gb ram

To

Xeon x3450 with 32gb ram

Naturally power usage went up a bit, but then again it can do the work now of 4 x R310's.....power usage didn't quadruple

 

[DBordello]

It appears trying to optimize on noise, cost, and power, I can choose two.

I would love a C6100, but it appears that they can be noisy little fellas. The R310 is interesting, I will give that some thought, with some upgraded ram.