jpjapers

Is ECC necessary if youre not doing any processing tasks and its just being used as a file server?

Id say something in the region of £3k ($3800) We are only a very small studio im just looking to consolidate 4 old legacy fileservers into one unit with some fast 'working' storage and them some slower SSD storage and hopefully with a 10gig onboard LAN. The stumbling block im facing (as ive not done this before) is whether or not windows server would run on desktop hardware?

Well yeah but its 20 grand. Im literally looking for a machine spec i can throw 3 or 4 m.2 drives and some SSDs into and will run windows server and be reliable without spending £6k on proprietary dell stuff.

[BUMP] Any recommendations for a MOBO with 6 M.2 Slots? Or would i be better off utilising some PCIe adapters? Can you stripe m.2 across multiple pcie adapters?

Let me clarify. When i say a ton im talking maybe 5-6 TB which i reckon i can get away with in consumer gear. I was considering running the m.2 and having hdds mirror them every night as a backup for them. And then having separate mechanical drives or standard sata SSDs for stuff we really dont need fast access to. We arent huge so our server room isnt a room its a single full height rack haha. We dont really need enterprise level tech.

Hey! Im a 3D Artist at a small cgi studio of <10 people and our server setup is, well. A mess. Its made up of 3 very old xeon machines some of which still have mechanical drives in. Its kind of evolved over the years and ive inhereited this and i know we can do alot better. Im looking for a good solution to having fast working drives for things like active projects and our asset library and then a solution for archival storage and backups. It doesnt have to be an actual rackmount (though it can be as we have a rack for our render farm) but it could just be a standard case build with a ton of m.2 storage. I dont have a clue about the best way to do this so please advise!! I want 10 gig networking and a shitload of high speed m.2

Interesting

Doesnt enermax have a valve for topping up? Id guess if they include that its somewhat encouraged?. I like the enermax having the pump inline so that i can keep the case profile very low tbh. I know alot of cnc manufacturers. I might actually look at designing my own custom case.

Thanks everyone for your input. Id like to steer clear of the enermax coolers simply because ive read a few horror stories recently of them failing catastrophically. That build posted above in the Sliger Cerberus looks interesting especially with the sheer amount of fans in there. I think ill take a look at that as a starting point. Thanks all!!

Im a 3D Artist day to day and id like to have the freedom to take my workstation to offices and travel with it (semi)easily. Im looking at the 2950X with 64GB ram. Can anyone recommend a case that would not only allow this to be sufficiently cooled but that is also pretty slimline? I have a gtx 1080 and i can buy a riser but ideally id like it to be as SFF as possible without losing performance. Recommendations please!

We currently have 12 dell poweredge r610s with some 12 core xeons in but my memory has failed me on which. Theyre quite old though. We are only a small studio with less than ten people so we dont require massive processing power compared to say a commercial farm. I just cant currently justify the cost of the server hardware because its almost double the price for half the capacity of say a threadripper system. What would you recommend in this situation? Used nodes are still an option.

Thanks for that in depth response! If i hit any walls ill be sure to come back! Thanks again!

Windows Server 2012. Could you point me to some info on group policy? Im not a network admin or anything ive sort of inhereited all of this haha

Hi, Id like to get some control and automation on the render farm at work. Currently theres no deployment manager or anything like that on them so i have to manually install software on all of them which takes an age. Can anyone recommend or ELI5 a method of deploying new software installs or updates to all of the machines? Thanks

Hi, Im looking for suggestions for some servers for my render farm. Its a small company so they dont need to be top spec. just a good balance between price and performance will suffice. I was tempted to build my own threadripper gen 1 3U mount systems because of the price vs a 16 core EPYC server. Can anyone comment on whether that might be a good way of getting good performance vs buying server grade hardware?