WorkingOnWise

While I wait for the drive caddies and hard drives to arrive, I'm figuring out where to put this server and how to make sure it's got enough air flow. As you might know, these things are LOUD! I looked up the specs for the 6 fans and was shocked! They are 76 CFM fans that spin as 16,500 rpm. No wonder this thing is so noisy! So, that figured out to 456 CFM of air flow. That seemed like a very high number to me, so I started looking. With the cover on, there isn't much area at all for air intake. I'm frankly surprised it is able to stay cool enough to run properly at all! I'm no expert, but it looks to me as if HP worked hard on starving this thing for cooling air and then stuck in the most powerful fans that would fit, in an attempt to draw such a massive vacuum that there would be airflow in spite of their attempts to block off every possible path for cooling air to get in! It's the same as if you stuck your hand over a vacuum cleaner hose. The pitch goes WAY up as the motor attempts uselessly to draw air in. So what am I missing here? Is the cooling system on these servers so restricted that the only solution was to feed it with 4x the actually needed cfm capacity just to draw in barely enough air? I'm thinking I can drill a few big holes in the top cover at the intake side of the fans, put a screen and a foam filter to stop dust and debris from getting in, and quiet this thing down drastically! Does anyone with more experience have some input for me on this?

It does have one 3 slot riser card and the openings for standard sized cards to the back.

In the manuals I can find for this server, they all point out the existence of the SD Card slot on the motherboard, but no mention of its purpose, use, capabilities or limitations. Can someone shed some light on this for me?

I bought this server and don't have a vga display, so I've ordered an AMD Radeon HD 6450 video card with hdmi so I can connect to a display. Will I be able to use this video card to see the boot up and configuration programs like I could with a regular PC? Since I've never seen this server run, I won't know if the problem is the video card of the server if I don't get a display output, so I need to know what to expect. I really don't want to buy a vga display, even a cheap used one, when this is probably the only computer I will ever use it on.

The server will be here this afternoon so I'm already into it. I wasn't aware of Premier pro not playing well with the second cpu. That's kinda a bummer! I won't be using raid as a backup, but for redundancy. Given the potential size of a video project, I feel a lot better about it if I know one drive can fail and I don't lose anything, no matter the size or number of files. With one drive, one failure is everything, and as you know, one drive in a 5 disk array is nothing, as long as I get a spare in asap, before Murphy gets wind of it! With 25 disks, I have a LOT of options for what do with my storage, which I like. I have only experienced 2 drive failures in 25 years. And one of them cost me 10 years of archived data because I was an idiot and didn't have a backup for 3 days. The time will come when I'll have a server that is comparable to a Storanator and the drives will all be new and have a nice long life expectancy. But for now, I've got to work with what I can afford and hedge my bets on old equipment with redundancy. I have seen the prices of the Cpus vary wildly, so I'll just have to watch for a pair that swings low on price! For backups, I'm not sure what I'll do. In the short term, I can use hard drives and take them off site regularly. But if I gather 40 or 50 or 200tb of video that I need to keep, it'll get interesting fast. I'm thinking long term here. I don't even know what's available for backup solutions of that capacity, and I'm sure they are more than I can afford any time soon, if ever! Those are good points about the server already being worn out. Had not considered that. So maybe is what I'll do is build this one up to the bare minimum for my current needs and save my money to buy something less wore out. Unless I can land a NIB Gen 10 server for a few hundred bucks! Lol Since I don't have the machine on my bench yet, I haven't seen first hand, but what I've read says that there's not room for the typical high end gpus because they are double width. I could do an extention cable and put the gpu in a separate enclosure, which I might do, but if I want everything to fit in the covers, I'm told I'm pretty limited. But, we still haven't addressed my question. Since I've already got this server, it's what I'm working with for a while. Is it a reasonable machine for 4k video editing and blender once I get 32 or 64gb of ram in it?

I'm no expert here, so I'm just going off the numbers. The Quadro might be overkill, but, and this is one almost unsolvable problem with servers, there just aren't many good options for really high performance gpus, so it may be the best choice for this situation. I went over to PC Builder and spec'd out a bottom dollar Ryzen 7 2700 system and came in, with 32gb of ram and a 2tb drive, at $850. Looking at the comparison between the 2700 and the E5-2640 the 2700 is indeed a little more than double the performance. I'm going to imagine that a server with dual Cpus and more memory channels and more pci lanes, and more L3 cache, that the performance will be a lot closer to matching, even when the DDR3 ram handicap of the server is considered. And, I do have the option of using Cpus with faster clock speeds or more cores too, so I've got headroom there as well. That build I spec'd out for under $900 has no raid capability at all, so I'd have to trust windows for that, and I'm not that much of a gambler. Then, there's drive capacity. 25 in the server vs maybe 4 or 5 on a cheap case? So even if I did want to trust windows with the raid array, raid 5 is it. The server gives me the option down the road to do a raid10 array and all the write speed benefits that can have. And, the server is a top shelf high quality machine built to last, where as the machine I spec'd is a bottom of the barrel machine. I understand that current tech is preferred, and if I had $10k to build a comparable machine, I wouldn't be here. The quality alone makes comparing any Dell or HP server to a budget build ridiculous in my book. I can build a 2700 system for under 600 new, and probably 400 with used parts, but it would be such a piece of crap that I'd have to build another one just to have one on hand when the first took a dump. I can't see that as being reasonable at all. I'll stick with my Proliant for now. I will agree that the noise is gonna take some creativity to solve cuz those 6 hot swappable fans are no joke! Lol

I'm on a VERY tight budget, and probably will be for at least the next few years. I've bought a server off eBay to use for as much as possible. I'm hoping that it will be the only non-mobile computer I'll need. It's an HP Proliant DL380p G8 with dual E5-2640s and 8gb of ram. It can take up to 768gb. It has room for 25 2.5" SAS or SATA drives and a RAID controller. The video is typical server fair. I think it's a Matrox G200 with 64Mb. The big reason I bought it is because I am getting into video editing and will be starting a YouTube channel, so there will be lots of video to store and process. I shot everything in 4k60 right now, on my Galaxy S9+. Initially, I'll upgrade the ram so that I've got 8gbx4 for 32gb of ram, and 1.2Tb of storage in a RAID5 config from 10 146gb SAS drives. As I find deals on larger drives, I'll reconfigure and expand my storage. So far, including everything, I'll have just under $400 into the build. The big big expense will be video. So far, it seems I can install a Quadro P2000 video card. That will be later this spring because the card and the kit to install it are going cost me about $500 by itself. All in, I expect to be at $1000 for the build, to a point where it should be useful for some serious work. My question is this... Is this setup reasonable for editing 4k video and blender renders using use a Linux virtual machine? If it can do that well, it will be able to do everything else I might want to do.