Home LAN server: old PC hardware vs. refurb. server

[Rowdy]

M. Milanuk wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> Recently my little home server (Asus bare-bones kit PC that I bought
> used a year + back, Sempron 1.6GHz, 1GB RAM, 13.7GB HD + two 500GB SATA
> drives, CD/DVD-ROM) took a dump.  It's in the local PC shop, but I fear
> the MB may be done for.  As such... I'm considering options.  One may be
> if the shop has or can get for a reasonable price replacement parts.  If
> not, I may be shopping CraigsList for another old mid-tower PC again.
> 
> In the past (6-8yrs ago) I had pretty good luck with some Dell
> refurbished workstations... so I started wondering if maybe their
> refurbished low-end servers might be a better idea than a
> run-of-the-mill desktop PC pressed into server duty.  Given that the
> load is extremely *low* (primarily backup file storage server for 2-4
> people) in this situation, I'm more just interested in the hardware
> lasting a good long while without having replace parts and/or the
> computer for the forseeable future.
> 
> Any experience or comments on the matter?
> 
> TIA,
> 
> Monte
> 

Greetings,

I have a Dell PowerEdge SC430 (not sure how low-end you were thinking).

It has been working without a hitch for more than 18 months.

I acquired it secondhand with 2 * 80G SATA HDD, and according to Dell it
can support only 2 HDD, but I installed a third 500G SATA HDD in the
second optical drive slot using a couple of brackets.  Another
alternative would be to replace the 2 * 80G HDD with 2 * 500G HDD.

It is quiet - you'd hardly know it was on.

I don't know what the actual power consumption is, but this server is
replacing a small cluster of Sun rack-mount servers, and the power bill
actually went down when I switched over to the Dell.

It has a 3.0GHz Pentium 4 CPU and, although the load is low, it has the
grunt for bigger tasks if I ever want it to.

It has only 1G DDR2 ECC RAM, but that type of RAM is not too expensive
if I wanted to expand it to 2G or even 4G.

The only thing to watch with actual "server" servers is that many of the
parts may be customised by the manufacturer for that particular model.
For example Dell servers used to have custom PSU with non-standard
pinouts - you'd want to check that as the PSU is one of the few
components likely to fail first.

Some Dell servers require caddys for hard drives - you could search eBay
for caddys or pay a premium to buy them from Dell.

It definitely has a custom mobo - if the mobo fails, basically replace
the server (unless you can find a replacement mobo on eBay).

Some servers have weird fans - again it would be difficult to replace
custom fans as the plugs or voltage requirements may be non-standard.

Rowdy