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Personal Server - Best Ebay Deal?

therightprice69
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Hey guys, long time viewer of LTT (since they started in the old house) and lurker on here. I want to buy a server for plex and personal storage but I want to make sure I get good bang for my buck with upgradabity and support for what I want to do.

 

what I want to do with this box: 

- plex server with a few TB of storage for my media along with transcoding abilities.

- personal storage with open cloud or something of the likes

- small rendering loads for a few projects I’m working on

- able to run unRAID

 

Ive found several servers on eBay that I see a contenders but I want to get second opinions before I buy. 

All these systems are older and under 500$ but seem to serve my purposes. 

 

IBM X3550 M3 - 499$

https://rover.ebay.com/rover/0/0/0?mpre=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ebay.com%2Fulk%2Fitm%2F312119220475

HP Prolient DL380 G7 - 112$

https://rover.ebay.com/rover/0/0/0?mpre=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ebay.com%2Fulk%2Fitm%2F192478112188

HP Prolient DL380 G7 - 474$

https://rover.ebay.com/rover/0/0/0?mpre=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ebay.com%2Fulk%2Fitm%2F361463039005

 

Does anyone have any thoughts on these, or reccomendations for other listings? Or know where I can get good HDDs possibly referbs for cheap? Thanks!

 

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Ive purchased a dell poweredge for myself off of ebay and it runs like a charm! However just keep in mind servers are loud. I would consider re-purposing an old desktop.

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In my option I would look into something more modern like socket LGA2011 or socket LGA1150 that way you have a decent upgrade path with future options in case you want a little more power.

 

supermicro has decent deals on refurbished barebone servers. You supply your own CPU/RAM/HDDs. They cost around the $200~$300 mark:

LGA2011 $325 barebones dual socket

LGA1150 $250 barebones single socket

Guides & Tutorials:

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Ventoy - The USB Multi-Boot Utility!

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Don't see what you need? Check the Full List or *PM me, if I haven't made it I'll add it to the list.

*NOTE: I'll only add it to the list if the request is something I know I can do.

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Unless you have really cheap power, I wouldn't recommend getting an actual server.  I got a 5 year old super micro server on Craigslist for $100.  I though I got a really good deal until I got my power bill for that month.  Running the server raised my power bill by $150.  Now I have a Mac Mini acting as my server and it works just as fine for me as the super micro server did.

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5 minutes ago, crookedstubby15 said:

Unless you have really cheap power, I wouldn't recommend getting an actual server.  I got a 5 year old super micro server on Craigslist for $100.  I though I got a really good deal until I got my power bill for that month.  Running the server raised my power bill by $150.  Now I have a Mac Mini acting as my server and it works just as fine for me as the super micro server did.

this seems a little overkill price wise, it really shouldnt have increased your power bill that much. You must have REALLY expensive Electricity charges in general for it to jump up that much. Or it was a really really high powered server which wasnt very power efficient.

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8 minutes ago, factorialandha said:

this seems a little overkill price wise, it really shouldnt have increased your power bill that much. You must have REALLY expensive Electricity charges in general for it to jump up that much. Or it was a really really high powered server which wasnt very power efficient.

Older servers tend to burn power really quickly

My life

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Just now, Himommies said:

Older servers tend to burn power really quickly

agreed but thats just crazy, at my current kwh cost id have to pull over a 1000 watt load for 24 hours to get anywhere close to $100 a month

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I’m in the US Army, living in the barracks. I don’t pay for power so it’s a non issue.

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I was also really hoping to get a full system minus hard drives.

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the IBM SYSTEM X3550 looks to be a good deal, but you will be limited in storage expanability and redundancy, and there isn't much PCIe solt space for extra expansion like a GPU (really recermened for rendering out projects, helps a lot)

the HP DL380 G7 is a really good deal with a load of space for drives and PCIe cards, the only draw back is that PCIe slot 5 & 6 are half height PCIe, but still a good deal as it's cheaper then the IBM and has more expansion fpr storage and extra PCIe cards (GPU's, networking cards etc)

the HP is the better choice on my opinion

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You can relatively cheaply cobble together a 4U device in a regular chassis, which is what I've done. Can use less power hungry parts that more suit your purposes that way. I used a combination of retail items, ebay and actually just talking with datacenters directly and getting them to sell me cheap old parts they don't need.

 

Otherwise, HP are quite good, quieter than most I've seen, and generally pretty functional but as mentioned by another poster the PCI-E slot capabilities aren't always good as they're usually 2U devices.

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I'm not sure about all servers.. But unraid does not like all raid controllers that you find in servers.. atleast not older once.

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I hate my DL380 G6. it is extremely picky when it comes to OS choice and boot loaders. 

Good luck, Have fun, Build PC, and have a last gen console for use once a year. I should answer most of the time between 9 to 3 PST

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