I need help picking a server....

[Squee_z]

I need a server with 3 TB and 32 GB ram or more for a small price... Linus should do a video on cheap storage servers. I've been looking into the DELL servers. And wow... DELL sells servers..

[hconverse02]

Look around used in your area, maybe a college or business has something before you spend a lot on a new server.

[Master Disaster]

5 minutes ago, Squee_z said:

I need a server with 3 TB and 32 GB ram or more for a small price... Linus should do a video on cheap storage servers. I've been looking into the DELL servers. And wow... DELL sells servers..

What purpose? 32GB is unnecessary for a file server.

[ProjectBox153]

What is the server for? A file server doesn’t need 32GB of RAM. 

[kerradeph]

Ebay. Look for Dell R510 servers. They're reasonably cheap and you can get stupid amounts of DDR3 registered ECC memory for really cheap. Companies are upgrading to new hardware so there's tons of the DDR3 stuff on the market.

 

You can also look at just building a small computer with lower end server grade hardware. That's basically what I did for my storage server. Xeon E3 Gen 3 with a Host Bus Adaptor (HBA) card and then I'm running FreeBSD (The OS FreeNAS is based on) and using ZFS. You can also virtualize if that's what you're planning to use the memory for by using virtual box.

[kerradeph]

Just now, Name Taken said:

The Dell PowerEdge R710 is one of cheapest and most the most readily available servers.

If they're aiming for 32GB and don't need a ton of processing, the R510 can be found for less and is fairly easy to find used as well. Both are 2U and the 510 generally has higher storage capacity options like 8 bay since companies use them as NAS systems with mild services being run as well. 

[NelizMastr]

On the other side of the fence:

 

HP DL360 G6 or G7

HP DL380 G6 or G7

HP ML350 G6

 

Pretty much equal to the mentioned Dell servers. Same platform, imo better remote management though. Not using HP firmware on your drives will make you go deaf however

[cj09beira]

this can help you have an idea of what you can get

http://www.bargainhardware.co.uk

[NelizMastr]

8 minutes ago, Name Taken said:

On the downside, they are loud, uses alot of electricity, takes up alot of space if not using a rack, and uses decade old Nehalem era CPU which is why they are all over the used market.

A server using Nehalem or Westmere CPUs will use about 100W idle. Source: my 12-core, 80GB RAM DL380G7 with 8 15K SAS disks  

 

So it's really not THAT bad. Older Harpertown and Clovertown Xeons combined with FBDIMM DDR2 is the real global warming architecture   easily 200-250W idle.

[kerradeph]

15 minutes ago, Name Taken said:

On the downside, they are loud, uses alot of electricity, takes up alot of space if not using a rack, and uses decade old Nehalem era CPU which is why they are all over the used market.

True. But if you want any kind of new hardware on a pre-built server, you're going to be hurting in the wallet. Also there are some low power use 5600 series CPUs which would make it not too bad. 

[Dark]

I started a thread yesterday about a very inexpensive 1U I found.  I don't have first hand experience on it at this time since it's still in transit.

 

 

You can find E5 v1 chips for very, very cheap.  Same goes for DDR3 rdimm memory.

May need to consider an SFP to RJ45 module though.