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Home server hardware

I’ve had a home server running 24/7 for more than 10 years now. Originally my home servers used old hardware I no longer had any use for, at one stage my server setup consisted of three different computers all to some extent reliant on each other. Eventually I had come to rely on my home server so much that this hodgepodge was taking too much of my time to keep running, so I purchased a proper server, a Dell Poweredge 830 with ECC memory and internal space for up to 4 hard disks. I have been very pleased with it, it has run 24/7 for 6 years.
However, no product is perfect, and the Dell Poweredge server ultimately has had two things going against it:

• It wasn’t particularly silent
• Its Intel Pentium 830D CPU is probably one of the most power hungry CPU’s made by Intel.

The noise was not excessive, and I have a cupboard where my node 0 resides. Only problem with that was that it got a little hot during the summers forcing me to leave the door ajar. Power usage was around 115 watts/hour, so just over 1000 kWh/year. At current prices (around £0.13/kWh) it was costing me about £130 to run a year. Being an environmentally-minded person I really wanted to cut down on that.
I’ve been considering various small servers with Intel Atom CPU’s, but they are not exactly cheap compared to Dells latest entry-level servers. Although I would like to cut down on my energy usage I didn’t want to replace a perfectly working system with something that at the end of the day would cost me more than what I would save.

The Dell Poweredge server has now been switched off. After 6 years of continuous use it was probably just a matter of time before one or more of the harddisks would fail, and I finally ran out of disk space as well. With all my photos, CD’s and DVD’s ripped and available to my xbmc mediacenter (and in fact any other computer at home) over my network, 2TB was not enough in the end, so new disks had to be bought. When I then discovered the HP ProLiant N36L Microserver which, with an HP cashback offer, was available for around £125, I was sold.

The Microserver has room for 4 internal harddisks (like the old Dell server), it is considerably smaller, almost silent, uses about ½ the amount of electricity that the Dell used, and the CPU is, according to benchmarks I’ve seen on the internet, faster than the current Intel Atom CPU’s. At the price mentioned above and the reduced power usage, it will earn itself back in less than two years.

Anybody out there interested in a used Dell Poweredge 830?

Tags: Dell, HP, Microserver, N36L, Poweredge, ProLiant, xbmc

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