nas HP ProLiant DL380 G6 as Home Server

[Chamstram]

I'm looking for a Home Server/Nas to store pictures movies and backup al the family PCs with the possibility to remote access. I was looking at the HP ProLiant DL380 G6  with two Zeon E5620 QuadCore 2.4 Ghz, 32 GB of RAM and as a start 2 3GB Western Digital WD Red HDD. For the OS i was thinking about buying Windows Home server 2016 or go with FreeNas but i'm open to suggestion. Would this be a good setup to begin with ?  For the HP ProLiant the price is around 200 euros for a refurbished machine including the processors and ram. 

[Nikolithebear]

On 9/11/2017 at 11:58 AM, Chamstram said:

I'm looking for a Home Server/Nas to store pictures movies and backup al the family PCs with the possibility to remote access. I was looking at the HP ProLiant DL380 G6  with two Zeon E5620 QuadCore 2.4 Ghz, 32 GB of RAM and as a start 2 3GB Western Digital WD Red HDD. For the OS i was thinking about buying Windows Home server 2016 or go with FreeNas but i'm open to suggestion. Would this be a good setup to begin with ?  For the HP ProLiant the price is around 200 euros for a refurbished machine including the processors and ram. 

FreeNAS requires drive level access so youd have to flash the raid controller to IT mode and just use it as a HBA.  But if you just want something simple you can grab 2 drives for the OS (Raid 1) and grab 2 drives for the Data Storage (Raid 1).  Then either use a normal windows OS (Win10) or splurge and get a Windows Server License however they are really expensive.  

 

[GDRRiley]

Don't get one. I have one and they suck at trying to get an OS installed and working. It doesn't like the default boot loader, so I haven't ever gotten freenas to work. With windows you may have better luck.the onboard P410i also is missing and HBA mode. you would be better off grabbing a cheap desktop and slapping it in a hot swap case if you want that. 

[Levisallanon]

If you just want to store pictures and movies etc and don't use any of the "server" features just go with a synology NAS or something like that. having all this ram and processing power is very overkill if you aren't ever going to use it for stuff anyways. Even if you want to do hardware 4K video encoding for streaming you don't need this kind of stuff because dedicated hardware for it is often better (which can be included in for example a synology NAS).

[Nnyan]

You should consider the fact that a number of enterprise servers are very picky about the hardware you install in them.  For example, if you put in a non-HP HBA card your system fans will run at full speed b/c (from what I've read) it can tell how hot the unit is.  I've heard off issues with ram, hard drives, etc...  

[Salacious B Crum]

I just finished setting up my prebuilt HP i7 6700 16 gigs of ram as an unRAID server you should look into that I'm not a linux person and fear the command prompt but I have it running perfect it has a nice GUI, it currently has 5 drives, 1 4TB parity, 2 4TB data and 2 240gig ssd's as cache drives more than enough for regular family needs. You can run plex or even run VM's if your into that kinda thing I've been very happy with it and the support for it is excellent.