Dell Poweredge 2800 will it work...

[Dfrontiera]

I just got a dell Poweredge 2800 server for free from my wife's work. They were decommissioning it and instead of sending it to the recycling place she thought maybe we could set it up as a home server for sharing media and other files. I've got a lot of experience with PCs but not so

much on servers. 

 

What im trying to figure out is whether this would be worth setting up and would it work as a file and media sharing server or is it a bit too slow for that. According to the online specs it has a 3.2ghz Xeon processor and can support up to 16gigs one source says ddr2 but another says pce RAM. It also uses SCSI hard drives. 

 

We are mainly gamers and wouldn't have any business applications that we would use this thing for. So I'm wondering if we could use it for media and files or what other options. I'm also wondering if it's worth upgrading since I would have to upgrade the ram and hard drives. 

 

Basically TL:DR would a dell poweredge server fast enough to run as a media and file server for home use? If so is it worth upgrading the ram and hard drives?

 

thanks!!

D

[Jacktastic-Mofo]

I'm working with a power edge 2650 right now and it's not that good (although it is also a few years older than yours) I'd personally recommend trying to sell it and create a faster LGA 775 based system with SATA drives.

[dalekphalm]

16 minutes ago, Dfrontiera said:

I just got a dell Poweredge 2800 server for free from my wife's work. They were decommissioning it and instead of sending it to the recycling place she thought maybe we could set it up as a home server for sharing media and other files. I've got a lot of experience with PCs but not so

much on servers. 

 

What im trying to figure out is whether this would be worth setting up and would it work as a file and media sharing server or is it a bit too slow for that. According to the online specs it has a 3.2ghz Xeon processor and can support up to 16gigs one source says ddr2 but another says pce RAM. It also uses SCSI hard drives. 

 

We are mainly gamers and wouldn't have any business applications that we would use this thing for. So I'm wondering if we could use it for media and files or what other options. I'm also wondering if it's worth upgrading since I would have to upgrade the ram and hard drives. 

 

Basically TL:DR would a dell poweredge server fast enough to run as a media and file server for home use? If so is it worth upgrading the ram and hard drives?

 

thanks!!

D

The fact that it is SCSI means that it's basically from the P4 era or older. It could certainly still work, but you will likely be limited by total drive space. Even the biggest SCSI drives top out at 300 GB.

 

Still, if your storage needs weren't too big, you could likely max out all the HDD's and get a few TB of drive space, depending on how many disks it can hold.

 

We are recycling a similar Dell server at work and it can hold 8x SCSI HDD's. I don't want it because my server already holds 12 TB of drive space so that thing would be a downgrade for me.

 

We might be getting rid of our Dell R310 1U server soon though. It only has 4x SATA/SAS drive bays but if I can hook it up to my existing 16-bay SAS expander unit, it would work awesome (plus we have a Dell 12-bay Storage Vault SAS expander that might go with it that I would love to snag).

My current server is running a 775 era Xeon on a shitty old consumer board, with an LSI 8888-elp RAID card and a bunch of mismatched disks. It needs a lot of work.

[Dfrontiera]

Thanks for such quick responses. Based on your comments I think I'll take the advice and maybe mess with it a bit, but ultimately I think I'll sell it and wait till something else presents itself. 

 

Thanks so so much for your quick input. It's greatly appreciated!!

-D

[Fetzie]

There are likely quieter solutions that'll get you better results - those things are loud (while not an issue in a server room, if you have four 80mm fans spinning at 3000+ RPM then you're going to hear it elsewhere in the house)