December 1, 201213 yr Hi. Just looking into building a server, and would like to establish if any of my spare bits and pieces are of any use. I've got a pair of Lenovo 6075 workstations, fairly basic boxes and pretty hard to find much detailed info about. The Lenovo site had some very high-level info, but hopefully someone with more knowledge than me might be able to offer some insight - I've included the machine spec below, with irrelevant bits edited out. Power supplies are crappy, thinking the fans all I can salvage from either box - given the price of hardware, I reckon I might just be better off buying specifically for a server build. I've got a stack of WD, Seagate and Lacie drives, so storage is sorted. MOBO Supports Intel Core™ 2 Quad™ processor with up to 12MB L2 cache Supports Intel Core™ 2 Duo™ processor with 2MB or 4MB L2 cache Supports Intel Celeron®™ with 1MB L2 cache Supports Intel® Pentium® dual core™ with 1MB or 2MB L2 dual core cache Supports I/O bus speeds of 1333 MHz Processor Intel® Pentium® Dual core processor Intel Celeron® processor Intel Core™ 2 Duo processor Intel Core™ 2 Quad processor Cache 12MB cache - Intel Core™ 2 Quad 4MB cache - Intel Core™ 2 Duo 1MB cache - Intel Celeron® 2MB cache - Intel® Pentium® dual core Chipsets Q35 North Bridge - Intel 82Q35 Graphics and Memory Controller Hub (GMCH) ICH9 South Bridge - 82801IO ICH9DO I/O Controller Hub SMSC SCH5617 LPC Super IO Winbond TPM IDE controller 4 Serial ATA connectors Memory 533MHz / 667MHz / 800MHz DDR2 (Double Data Rate) dual channel memory support PC2-5300 and PC2-6400 memory supported Four 1.8V, 240-pin DDR2 SDRAM UDIMM sockets Support for up to 8 GB of DDR2 SDRAM ECC or parity memory is not supported Use 256MB, 512MB, 1GB, or 2GB memory modules in any combination up to a maximum of 8.0GB Networking Integrated Intel Gigabit Ethernet Intel 82566DM Ethernet controller Bays One 3.5-inch external accessible bay (FDD) Two 3.5-inch internal hidden bay (HDD) Two 5.25-inch external half-high bay (optical drives) Slots Slot 1: Full height, PCI Express x16 Slot 2: Full height, PCI Express x1 Slot 3: Full height, half length PCI Slot 4: Full height, half length PCI Power Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) support 280 Watt power supply with manual voltage selection switch Automatic 50/60 Hz input frequency switching Video Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 3100 15-pin VGA output on planar Uses Intel Dynamic Video Memory Technology (DVMT) For models without a separate video card, memory supports both system and video.
December 1, 201213 yr Those specs aren't too far off from my current desktop system at home. I expect that either of those units are more than capable of serving as a decent unRAID server. The only downside I see to just plugging in and testing one out is whether the BIOS is recent enough to accept HDDs larger than 2 TB. I checked out the Lenovo web site and I was surprised to see that it has recent BIOS updates. If you go to this page: http://support.lenovo.com/en_US/downloads/default.page? and select your model it will list everything available for download. It makes you pick a model and OS, but for BIOS I think it will show the same files regardless of those settings. I picked the AFU model and Windows Vista SP 2 and saw that there is a BIOS update from 2011 that you can put on a CD and install from. [Edit to add: the selections were: Desktop & All-in-ones Thinkcenter M series Thinkcenter M57 6075 AFU Windows Vista Service Pack 2 * end of edit] The cases themselves are probably the suck when it comes to loading up with a stack of disks. And only 4 SATA ports on the mobo is limiting too. But if I were in your shoes I'd download unRAID 5.xx onto a mem stick and see if it boots up and recognizes the integrated network chip. If no, sell for whatever you can get on Craigslist. If yes, then I'd see if it can detect and successfully pre-clear your largest drive. If yes on that, you've got a server. PSU is probably inadequate and case is small, but I'd start out with both and see how it goes. If you're already set on buying a new case and PSU, I'd just ditch these two workstations completely and buy new. Capacitors are usually the first things to go and if Lenovo went cheap on these than they may not be functional for much longer anyhow. Dunno, and the cheap bastard in me would want to see how much I could wring from them. But if you've got more money than time, then new may be the way to go. In that case even the fans probably aren't worth the effort. When scavenging old boxes I pick everything useful out of them, including all the case switches and LEDs. Then the carcass goes to the dump.
December 2, 201213 yr Author Thanks, that's kind of what I was thinking - the PSU is soft, and the case capacity isn't great, but for a first build it's probably going to be enough. The 4 SATA ports too should be fine for a bit of tinkering, then I can establish what I really want to build. Thanks for the advice re BIOS flashing too.
December 2, 201213 yr Good luck going forward. It's sort of a matter of pride for me to put donated computer parts to use.
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