# need opinions



## magnethead (Mar 18, 2006)

I have a Dell Poweredge 2650, and a 1650. Got a lot of them from a neighbor, and kept these two, already sold the rest.

Here's my dilemma:

Right now, my NAS/WWW server is a 320 GB IDE drive behind a 1.6 GHz Turion on a caveman's motherboard, running server 2003. Yea. You're chuckling, i can hear it. It's in my "Hybrid Twist" computer, which has triple 10" fans on the side, and 4 booster 80mm fans, plus a spot for a 120mm booster fan. Big problem, is that I got Server03 using an MSDNAA Account that I no longer have. So I would have to somehow clone the IDE drive over to the new drive, and hope a repair install would work. Even then, I'm still stuck with a 32 bit O/S.

Here are my options: 

*OPTION ONE:*

Take the 2650, invest $30 in fans (noise) and $60 in hard drives

Pro: I have it, and dual dual-core 2.8 GHz @ max RAM, 

Con: 2003 Xeon's are 32 bit, so the 5.5 GB of RAM in it right now is worthless, and 80 pin SCSI are impossible to find if a questionable-at-best ebay drive fails.

*OPTION TWO:*

Upgrade to a QX9500 series CPU and cooler in this rig (my main desktop, something i plan to do this spring anyways), invest in a 775 series board, and put them in the Turion machine.

Pro: 64 bit, quad core, load it sky high with RAM, heat/noise will never be issue

Con: Have to find a 775 socket motherboard AND do a power supply upgrade AND get memory for the motherboard AND get a hard drive AND do a complete OS reinstall with 64 bit server....

-------------------------------------------

Basically, here are the side-by-side options:

Option 1: 4 new (used) 80-SCSI hard drives ($60)
Option 2: 1 new SATA hard drive ($80)

Option 1: Multiple fans ($30)
Option 2: Motherboard + RAM ($.........NaN)

Option 1: Install 32-bit Server OS on new drive ($.....NaN)
Option 2: Install 64-bit Server OS on new drive ($.....NaN)


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## magnethead (Mar 18, 2006)

found out about dreamspark, "that was easy."

https://www.dreamspark.com/Products/Product.aspx?ProductId=17

Takes the OS part of the equation away. downloading both the x64 and x86 packages now.


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## Wrench97 (May 10, 2008)

You sure you need 64 bit and 5 gig of ram on it?


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## magnethead (Mar 18, 2006)

wrench97 said:


> You sure you need 64 bit and 5 gig of ram on it?


heck no. lol. i could suffice just fine on 32 bit, not like i'm running a ****load of stuff on it. The turion just crumbles, crashes, and burns when i try to run anything more than wordpress on it...coppermine...lets not go there. Joomla? Yea, no. My big thing is trying to find hard drives, i have one working 146GB seagate, gotta find 3 more, with caddy's.


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## Wrench97 (May 10, 2008)

How about a Sata card?


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## magnethead (Mar 18, 2006)

wrench97 said:


> How about a Sata card?


servers don't work that way :/

It's got 2 RAID channels, not sure what the 5th bay is for, all 80 pin SCA SCSI Hot-swappable. So the most I can get out of it is 146x2 = 292 GB or so, unless I find a way to stripe all 4 to 584GB.


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## Wrench97 (May 10, 2008)

Yea but you can add in a sata card and drives for storage, not as fast as the SCSI but a lot cheaper if you don't need the speed.


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## magnethead (Mar 18, 2006)

wrench97 said:


> Yea but you can add in a sata card and drives for storage, not as fast as the SCSI but a lot cheaper if you don't need the speed.


not really. I would have to take out the backplane (which will make the system not POST...), and there's no power connectors to even plug the drives into since it's all integrated and SCA.


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## magnethead (Mar 18, 2006)

Here's what I'm workign with. The 1650 I haven't done so much as touch, i think the CPU socket can explain why (indicator of age).


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## magnethead (Mar 18, 2006)

Dell PowerEdge 1650
Hardware Details: 
Manufacturer: Dell
Model: PowerEdge 1650
Hard Drive: 36G 15K SCSI
Tested RAM: 1024 MB
Processor Information: Intel Pentium III
Number: Dual 
Clock Speed & Cache: Intel Pentium III 1.4 GHz L2 Cache 512 KB
SCSI Controller Info: Adaptec AIC-7892 Ultra160/m PCI SCSI Card
SCSI Firmware Revision: BIOS V2.7-0
Video Controller: ATI Rage XL PCI
Network Card: 2 x Intel Pro 1000 XT Gigabit Ethernet Adapters

2650:

Form factor: 2U rack height
Processor(s): Up to two Intel® Xeon™ processors at 2.0GHz, 2.4GHz, 2.8GHz, 3.06 GHz and 3.2GHz with hyper-threading support

Front side bus: 533MHz front side bus designed for fast data throughput
L2 cache 512KB advanced transfer cache designed to improve access time to server
data; 1MB L3 cache with 3.06GHz and 3.2GHz processors; 2MB L3 cache with
3.2 GHz processors

Chipset: ServerWorks® GC-LE Chipset supports five PCI buses: three PCI-X (1 x 64bit/133MHz, 2 x 64bit/100MHz), one 64bit/66MHz, one legacy bus (32bit/33MHz)
Memory: 256MB - 12GB PC266 ECC DDR SDRAM, Six DIMM sockets on system board configurable for Spare Bank support

RAID controller: Embedded dual channel Ultra3 (U160) SCSI with 128MB cache (enablement optional)
Drive bays: Hard drive bay for 5 x 1" or 2+3 hot-plug SCSI drives
Media bay for one 24X IDE CD-ROM or 8X IDE DVD ROM, one 3.5" 1.44MB diskette drive
Maximum internal storage: 730GB (5 x 146GB)
Hard drives: 18GB, 36GB, 73GB, 146GB Ultra320 SCSI


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## magnethead (Mar 18, 2006)

My Budget is Sub-$100.

I can spend $50/drive for 1-4 HDD's, and have no idea how long they will last (If they last a long time, all dandy. If they all fail after a month....).

Or I can take the Q8200 from my desktop, get a decent Mobo ($100), RAM ($100), power supply ($100), and high capacity hard drive ($100), and have a future proof desktop-kind-of-server.

I don't know what to do.


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## magnethead (Mar 18, 2006)

I think i'm going to live with the single 146GB drive. That's free since I already have it, all I need to do is convert to the less noisy fans and put the OS on it.

what I have now-

1.6 Ghz Duron OC'd to 1.8
ECS M848LU Motherboard
1G of PC2700 RAM
NVidia MX4000 gfx card
320GB IDE drive, 123 GB used

Life- ?????

vs

2x 2.8HT Ghz
Server Motherboard
5.5GB of RAM
146GB SCSI HDD

Shipped 2/21/2003, warranty expired 2/20/2008 (per Dell Service Tag)

vs

2.33 GHz quad
Motherboard ($100)
RAM ($100)
750+ GB SATA HDD ($100-150)
Power Supply ($100)

Would last ??? years

I think that as long as I can get my disk space thing figured out, I'll be okay. Even then, nothing a $50 hard drive won't fix...even though it'll be a rip off of a drive.


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## magnethead (Mar 18, 2006)

new idea: I have all these Aopen/Dell/this/that power supplies laying here. Why couldn't I just put a PCI SATA card in the server, have the ATX power supply outside the case w/ a switched green wire (bench unit mode, basically), and run the wires inside the server to power the drives? I can install the OS on the single 146GB drive, and run all the server operations (NAS, WWW, ect) and what not from the SATA drives. SATA cables are small, so they could bend around the backplane to read the drive bays.


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## Wrench97 (May 10, 2008)

Ah a rack mount unit, I was thinking it was a tower server. 

The 5 year warranty on a rack unit is pretty much the Dell norm on non-leased units.

The PCI card idea would work, but what USB interface is there, maybe a simple external usb drive will satisfy the storage needs?


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## magnethead (Mar 18, 2006)

wrench97 said:


> Ah a rack mount unit, I was thinking it was a tower server.
> 
> The 5 year warranty on a rack unit is pretty much the Dell norm on non-leased units.
> 
> The PCI card idea would work, but what USB interface is there, maybe a simple external usb drive will satisfy the storage needs?


That's what I was thinking, it would make more sense in the power department (power brick vs ATX in bench mode), but USB speed is pretty slowwwwww for a web server, even of the most primitive types. I'm running an IDE drive now and it's "okay", but the CPU is the limiter there. Once I get 5.5 G of ram and the dual 2.8HT CPU's, the HDD becomes the limiting factor. I have a 1394 card laying around, but very few externals are firewire.

The next problem is that it wont read my DVD's, only CD's, and it's a proprietary drive. So i'm thinking to see of disk manager in OSX will allow me to clone the boot CD over to my external drive, so I can boot the server to it.


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## magnethead (Mar 18, 2006)

I think the easiest thing to do will definitely go with an esata/sata external single drive. It's just a matter of do I just use a bare drive, or do I put a bare inside a housing, or do I get an integrated drive.


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