Slashdot Mirror
Replacing a Personal Rack-Mounted Server?
Starky writes "Many moons ago, I cobbled together a 1U rack mount from parts which has since been diligently serving up my homepage and web sites for family and friends. It's a truly "Mom and Pop Shop" setup, running on a rack secluded in a closet at home over a DSL line. At the time, I was able to piggyback my order on a large order placed by a company for which I was working, allowing me to get a substantial discount.
Now, the time has come to consider a replacement. However, I no longer work at a company that orders chassis and chips by the dozen. I would like to get a rack-mountable chassis, but don't know where to go as a lowly individual consumer looking for a box with minimal specifications (1 processor, dual drives, and 1G RAM is about all I need) at a reasonable price.
Any recommendation from Slashdotters who maintain their own rigs?"
The rack-mounted chassis is what costs more than the normal PC parts, so just re-use the one you already have and order the rest of it from anywhere. You should be able to buy what you're looking for for less than $400 if you don't have to order the chassis.
The one thing I will note about rackmount servers is that they are all very noisy. For home installation, a desktop chassis will nearly always fit your needs and will be much quieter and more power-efficient than a rackmount. I recently replaced my home server with about $850 in parts from newegg. If you're interested in making a quiet desktop, take a look at SilentPCReview.
If you're set on a rackmount server, I've been very happy with Silicon Mechanics, but their cheapest machine is still ~$1000.
NewEgg or ZipZoomFly have motherboards, CPUs, Drives, and memory. But the big question is why update? What is wrong with the current server? I am sure you could saturate that DSL line with the server you have so why upgrade? Maybe just upgrade the disk? Or maybe more memory.
Your other option is to watch Geeks.com. Every now and then they have cheap refurbished servers.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I am just in the process of evaluating a new server to replace my home rack-mount.
.17 = $297.87 savings in power per year
As the previous poster mentioned, if you don't need a lot of power, the D-Link DNS323 with two SATA drives might fit the bill. I just got one and put in two 500GB drives. So far, it is doing a good job replacing my home server for file serving, web serving, email, dns, dhcp, and rtorrent.
It cost about $300 ($160 for the unit, 2 x $70 for the drives on sale). The big payoff is that it uses (well, supposed to use since I haven't thrown the kill-a-watt on it yet) about 50W instead of the 250W that my current server uses.
200W * 24 hrs * 365 days / 1000 *
It will pay for itself in 12 months.
both have slightly older rack mounted computers on the cheap. in the order of $100 - $400. I've seen a dual xeon with 4 drives for like $250.
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
I've been running whitebox servers like that at home for years but recently decided, like the original poster, that I wanted to go with a rackmount setup. If you're deadset on building a custom system, then I can't offer much advise. Me, I picked up a couple of these.
Even after paying shipping and picking up a could of larger hard drives, I don't think I could have build a similar system any cheaper. One is my mail/web server and the other is an internal domain controller and file server.
They don't come with rails, so they're sitting on shelves in my rack rather than actually installed but I can live with that.
"The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.
I'm replacing a dying server, and for various reasons I'm getting a Dell, probably the PowerEdge 840. My questions:
To those who would tell me (and this story's poster) to Google it: I'd rather get today's recommendations from an interactive forum than try to find a website with the same information from the last year or so. Besides, what geek doesn't want to talk about hardware?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I have seen Via cpu/motherboard combos on newegg for under $50. Really cheap and low power. The motherboard for the GPC that Walmart was selling also runs about $50.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Seriously.
I used to have a dual CPU P3 1U rackmount server I used for those sort of things. A day of running it through a Kill-A-Watt showed me it was costing almost $40 a month in electricity.
That buys a LOT of hosting when you look at places like dreamhost, etc.
Seriously, I had the exact same concerns recently, however I refuse to listen to the insane noise usually coming from an 1U rack..
I bought a cheap mac mini (intel core solo) on ebay, gutted it, replaced the CPU, added 2 GB RAM and a 250 GB drive.. I then put an external 250 GB drive on top of it. Alternatively buy a brand new Mac mini with the specs you need.
There you go - $600 or so and you have a totally silent "home server".