Server prices vs Desktop prices

[silverzx]

Why are servers so damn cheap?

Is it mainly because they don't have beefy GFX cards?

Looking at buying one to chuck in the attic and back up photos etc to, use as an FTPS, Vent/Teamspeak server and possibly a MineCraft server or something similar in the future.

I was going to use an old Pentium 4 / 1GB DDR2 unit I have but looking at prices on eBay, it would be silly not to buy something like such:

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/141375366922

Dell CS24-SC Rack Server

- TWIN (2x) Quad Core Xeon 2.5 Ghz (L5420) - Intel VT-x (Virtualization) - 64-Bit - 12MB Cache - 1333Mhz FSB
- 12GB RAM PC2-5300P DDR2 ECC
- Embedded SATA RAID Controller - Capable of RAID - 0,1,10
- 4 x 3.5" SATA HDD Bays - (2 caddies supplied) - Ready to install 3.5" SATA Hard Drives
- Dual Embedded Gigabit NICs

Just browsing eBay seems there are some bargains to be picked up!

I haven't had a proper look, will spend a few hours looking over today/tomorrow, but I'm fairly sure I want to set one up!

I don't have any experience with servers so any techies feel free to contribute to the discussion (Ruan).

[mr_fish]

Will just say, full blown servers can be power hungry.

[powerandtorque]

Not to mention very noisy, which is likely to be of concern in a home environment.

I manage a lot of Dell servers at work and they're generally very good though.

[Eeyore]

Theres old and new things. There are lots of bargains as its no longer efficient or good enough for business use.

[silverzx]

Calm down boys, it's a home server to go in the attic, power, heat and noise are no concern of mine.

[Eeyore]

Just checked the spec... there is no hard drives included, memory is DDR2 so is slow, obvoiusly minimal graphics. Still seems cheap though!

[silverzx]

Just checked the spec... there is no hard drives included, memory is DDR2 so is slow, obvoiusly minimal graphics. Still seems cheap though!

As in my first post, my current option is my spare desktop:

Pentium 4 1.5GHz, 1GB DDR2, crap GFX, 80GB Sata HDD.

Basically for £100~£200 I can get a quad x 2, 12GB DDR2, it's not exactly going to be hosting a World of Warcraft server with 10,000 players or anything extravagant!

[Eeyore]

compared to that yes its a bargain! I relaly cant understand why its so cheap.... I mean... its got decent specs apart from the memory. You need to look at the specs of the motherboard and see if it can take DDR3 memory. if it can then youre on to a winner.

[silverzx]

Again, don't really see how DDR3 is going to be needed for my application..

Also found I have a spare 17" monitor, keyboard, mouse, Samsung External DVD-RW, ATI RADEON HD 5450 512MB GFX card so have everything minus the server to get going.

Oh and I need to buy another powerline adapter (200MB/s or 500MB/s) to get the attic connected to the router.

Like this:

www.ebay.co.uk/itm/351190171633

I'll probably get one via Auction though as in no rush and should save a lot.

Use them for my main PC, good bit of kit.

[Eeyore]

Been thinking about these powerline adapters more and more as the signal is crap in my london flat and it keeps dropping out in Ipswich too.

Not sure how the graphics card will fit in the server. Its got a PCI-e port so should plug in but not sure if it goes in sideways or whether youll have to cut the top of the case! Should be interesting anyway.

[ally406]

It would have been a fairly low end server even when new, it also does not include hard drives but these will be cheap as it's SATA. A typical business will have a 3-5 year hardware replacement program, and recycling companies are often paid to uplift old equipment. Still decent for the money though, I assume you aren't paying the electricity bill , a 500-900w power supply in servers is not uncommon. They are also noisy and hot as mentioned. Just keep it out of sight of whoever is paying the bill! An old laptop might be better, low power usage, good thermals, compact and built in battery backup

[Ruan]

Yeah, for example, those Dell CS24s aren't actually Dell made, just branded - they're made by a company called "DCS" who combined with a few other OEMs to get real cheap servers out... They were supposed to be the CHEAPEST way to get reasonably powerful servers into racks with the minimum amount of "crap"... They're Dell's "Cloud" server really, as in, very basic, simple, poor support etc - were used for virtualisation, HPC and VPS servers... Not much better than cheapy Supermicro stuff really - they're not akin to Dell's R series anyway.

FYI it will be noisy as f*ck, just trust me, soon as it comes under any load, it's going to ramp up and will be relatively power hungry...

They have absolutely NO graphics performance whatsoever, probably using an 8mb ATI rage or something, also in a 1u case, they've got not much in the way of storage, but if you want something that's pretty hefty in terms of compute power, they're a good option for relatively little money... Though I'd still say you're better off getting something like a HP Microserver - way more efficient and probably more than oomphy enough for what you want to do!

Mind you, that CS24 would shit over most £120 stuff you can buy new, but it's a cheap, compute powerful machine.. TBF Don't diss DDR2 memory too much - the speed means nothing, yes it runs faster, but there's more latency involved and 99% of the time, unless you have a seriously good CPU, you're limited by the memory controller anyway!

With a decent Linux distro on, be a nice machine... If you can deal with the noise.

[DarkInferno]

Why would you want to put another graphics card in it?

If you're using it as a server surely you'll just bang vSphere on so it'll just be burning power displaying the ip address?

[Ruan]

Lol vsphere.

[DarkInferno]

Whatever floats

I use Workstation on here and it does the job nicely.

[Ruan]

Eugh!

Have to use that ABORTION of a piece of software on Windows only to be able to manage it, which is just insanely slow and has a memory leak the size of China.

Not to mention the ESXi Hypervisor is slow as shit!

Horses for courses, to me it's just TYPICAL commercial software!

[DarkInferno]

I had ESXi on my server but the power supply blew up so I'll have to look at it one day (soonish)

[silverzx]

Ok so...

Powerline adapters, cheapest/best NEW option is £25 from Argos: www.ebay.co.uk/itm/360870715658



They'll probably get ordered up by end of tomorrow.

As for servers, the one I linked was one of the first in the list to pop up, I'll look into HP Microserver's.

It's not my electricity bill atm but I pay MORE than enough toward bills so it's no concern how much power it eats (Coin Farm in the Attic you say)? Actually, it would be good if it could be used to farm ALT coins when not doing other duties.. Hmm!

This is basically everything I want to use it for:

- Backing up files from PC (mostly photos via NFS)
- Downloading files remotely (Dropbox / FTPS)
- Hosting TeamSpeak/Vent server (from time to time)
- Hosting MineCraft (similar game alike) server (from time to time, if I take it back up)
- Hosting a website (just for a bit of fun, playing with HTML5 etc)

Would probably want to run a Linux distro on it as I have next to no Linux experience and it's required for most jobs.

[Ruan]

Yeah, be perfect for that really, but as said, you'll want to be wary of how much storage you can put in it, the onboard disk controller will likely be crap! You're probably going to want to stuff an SSD for the root filesystem and 3 big spinning disks and raid them with md... Disk performance probably won't be anything amazing, but then you're using 300-400mbit ethernet, so you're going to struggle to max them tbf... With that you can probably get away with virtualising what you need to with qemu-kvm/libvirt...

[DarkInferno]

coin mining is normally massively GPU intensive which servers usually haven't got.

how cpu intensive are teamspeak/minecraft servers?

[Ruan]

You were saying about bitcoin mining.....

[silverzx]

Yeah, be perfect for that really, but as said, you'll want to be wary of how much storage you can put in it, the onboard disk controller will likely be crap! You're probably going to want to stuff an SSD for the root filesystem and 3 big spinning disks and raid them with md... Disk performance probably won't be anything amazing, but then you're using 300-400mbit ethernet, so you're going to struggle to max them tbf... With that you can probably get away with virtualising what you need to with qemu-kvm/libvirt...

Ruan. I'll FB/WhatsApp you, too much sh't I want to discuss to talk about via forum.

coin mining is normally massively GPU intensive which servers usually haven't got.

how cpu intensive are teamspeak/minecraft servers?

Oh yeah, forgot about that...

Doubt Teamspeak uses much, minecraft could be GPU heavy but would need to read up. Might aswell try fit this spare GFX card if I can.

[Eeyore]

havent really been paying much attention to the coin mining scene but as far as i was aware it was difficult to make any money at home as most machines cost too much to power compared to what they can actually mine.

[procta]

if its just for a home use, then id just use the p4 and beef up the ram and HDDs, and bung what ever os you want on it with the programs of your choice.
what I did for my Microsoft shit, was build a Server with a basic motherboard and a graphics card, bit of ram, so it would run 2k3, bought a raid card for my 4 hdds and bunged into a full blown server ATX tower.
Ran spot on,

[Ruan]

I did a massive post on how pointless bitcoin mining is...

Unless you're running fully custom ASICs it's pretty pointless...

[silverzx]

havent really been paying much attention to the coin mining scene but as far as i was aware it was difficult to make any money at home as most machines cost too much to power compared to what they can actually mine.

Who said anything about making money? I was just saying it could mine ALT COINS if it wasn't doing anything else.

if its just for a home use, then id just use the p4 and beef up the ram and HDDs, and bung what ever os you want on it with the programs of your choice.
what I did for my Microsoft shit, was build a Server with a basic motherboard and a graphics card, bit of ram, so it would run 2k3, bought a raid card for my 4 hdds and bunged into a full blown server ATX tower.
Ran spot on,

Ran like a beut' did she! What was yours used for?

[Ruan]

Get it running something from the World Community Grid if you must... Join team XtremeSystems if you want, met some pretty epic guys who do that sorta stuff on there!

[toseland]

personally for server use you have to be careful about RCDs in the system and different ring mains when using ethernet over powerlines,
ie on the same ring main its fine, but we had issues with it in my house (all brand new electrics) as it was going through 2 seperate RCDs for each ring main, when connecting the modem downstairs, with the PC equipment upstairs.

i ended up running 2 Cat5 cables upstairs, one into the office and one into the loft (which now runs our CCTV system), via 2 sockets on the wall at each end (single socket with 2 plugs) to use

[silverzx]

personally for server use you have to be careful about RCDs in the system and different ring mains when using ethernet over powerlines,
ie on the same ring main its fine, but we had issues with it in my house (all brand new electrics) as it was going through 2 seperate RCDs for each ring main, when connecting the modem downstairs, with the PC equipment upstairs.

i ended up running 2 Cat5 cables upstairs, one into the office and one into the loft (which now runs our CCTV system), via 2 sockets on the wall at each end (single socket with 2 plugs) to use

Sorry, what?

[Eeyore]

Pretty sure what toseland is saying is that for powerline everything has to run through one fuse box. If you have two then its most likely the two plugs arent connected together in a way that allows them to network.