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Cigam · May 18, 2014

I found a guy selling a 15 year old Netfinity 5500 server for $45.

I'm really new to this and to say I have a lot of questions is an understatement.

Here are the details on the server:

http://www-947.ibm.com/support/entry/portal/docdisplay?lndocid=migr-497lgr

It has 4 Pentium III Xeon 500MHz processors but no hard drives

It says it has a maximum internal hard disk capacity of 109GBs, why is that cap there?
Could I put in a PCI SATA controller card and would that get rid of the memory cap?

Could this server handle a WordPress website while being a NAS at the same time?

I will happily take any advice anyone has, I'm very new to servers.

Thank you very much for your time.

willielikesmonkeys · May 20, 2014

I found a guy selling a 15 year old Netfinity 5500 server for $45.

I'm really new to this and to say I have a lot of questions is an understatement.

Here are the details on the server:

http://www-947.ibm.com/support/entry/portal/docdisplay?lndocid=migr-497lgr

It has 4 Pentium III Xeon 500MHz processors but no hard drives

It says it has a maximum internal hard disk capacity of 109GBs, why is that cap there?

Could I put in a PCI SATA controller card and would that get rid of the memory cap?

Could this server handle a WordPress website while being a NAS at the same time?

I will happily take any advice anyone has, I'm very new to servers.

Thank you very much for your time.

DO NOT BUY 15 year old hardware and intend it to be anything but broken. If you have a spare $45 and want to play around for shits and giggles sure. But at that price a Raspberry Pi is more worth it. This thing would cost more in the first year of operation than you paid for it.

If you really want a FreeNAS server look into Atom motherboards (the dual or single core ones). I recommend having a dedicated NAS box that only does that because much like Logan from Tek Syndicate recently said, your NAS should be a rock. nothing fancy, a rock. You can build a solid one yourself that will last you through 2020 (Probably longer) for under $400 and if you use it alot it's worth the investment.

Edit: Looking over the hardware again, the Ethernet is 100 Mbit and PCI isn't capable of Gigabit. So even if you got a sata to PCI adapter its limitted to 500Mbit at most. And a Raspberry Pi actually has a faster CPU and the USB on it is about as fast as PCI on this thing.

Madgemade · May 20, 2014

I must agree with the above, It will cost a lot to run that system and the performance will be very poor.

I would suggest a atom board with the soldered on cpu it will perform so much better than that system.

I'm not just making this up as I was running linux on a system with 2x1ghz PIII and when I moved to a D525 atom (see webserver in my sig) it was worlds faster and not to mention the power consumption!

And too your question about servers:

There is not an actual cap it's just they never had drives larger than that when those spec where written.
You will want SCSI drives for that system.
You can try using a pci sata card but I would be suprised if it worked as many servers have not got bios abilitys to use them as the hardware is simply to old.

I imagine it could handle a website fine as long as the NAS storgage was on a different drive(definatly if you end up with SCSI as they have max 160MB/s on that board).

BTW: If you don't have already then make sure you have at least 1GB ram in there as if you have the standerd 256MB then you are going nowhere!

willielikesmonkeys · May 20, 2014

I must agree with the above, It will cost a lot to run that system and the performance will be very poor.

I would suggest a atom board with the soldered on cpu it will perform so much better than that system.

I'm not just making this up as I was running linux on a system with 2x1ghz PIII and when I moved to a D525 atom (see webserver in my sig) it was worlds faster and not to mention the power consumption!

And too your question about servers:

There is not an actual cap it's just they never had drives larger than that when those spec where written.

You will want SCSI drives for that system.

You can try using a pci sata card but I would be suprised if it worked as many servers have not got bios abilitys to use them as the hardware is simply to old.

I imagine it could handle a website fine as long as the NAS storgage was on a different drive(definatly if you end up with SCSI as they have max 160MB/s on that board).

BTW: If you don't have already then make sure you have at least 1GB ram in there as if you have the standerd 256MB then you are going nowhere!

Again if you want to just fool around with servers, a raspberry pi was made to learn. A type b board has 512 mb of ram and theres a ton of documentation for it. Maybe try playing with one of those before putting out a few hundred for a NAS. A Pi is small, and uses almost no electricity versus a big clunky system with failing parts.