Dell PowerEdge 2900 - Any good for a basic NAS?

[NREES87]

We've recently decommissioned one of these in the office and it's destined for the scrapheap - so I wondered if it would be any good as an unRaid box?

 

Specs

Processors: 2 x Quad-Core Intel® Xeon® 5300

Memory: 2 x 2GB (Supports up to 48GB of DDR2 667MHz)

Hard Drives: None (But I have 2 x 2TB Seagate Barracuda 7200rpm disks in my drawer, with plans to purchase/acquire several more for this project)

Drive Bays: Currently has 8 X Hot Swap SAS/SATA bays (with SAS backplanes) and 3 x 5.25" drive bays

Power Supply: 2 x 930W PSU (with hot-swap redundancy)

Networking: 2 x Broadcom NetXtreme II™ 5708 Gigabit2 Ethernet NIC with fail-over and load balancing

 

Use Case

I'm not looking for anything to set the world alight - I'm simply looking for something that will serve as a NAS / Media Tank for my ever-growing library of ripped discs and lossless audio collection.

 

If it's able to act as an NVR for a few as-of-yet-unpurchased IP CCTV cameras - then great!

 

Cheers,

Nate

[tdallen]

Hi -

 

These older boxes can work, but they can also be a pain.  It will have enough horsepower to run unRAID and 4GB of RAM is sufficient.  You could definitely stand up a basic NAS with it.  But, these old boxes tend to be heavy, loud, power inefficient and run hot.  And if it only takes SAS hard drives then that further limits your options.  You can give it a try (it's free with an unRAID trial license) and I'm sure you'll have some degree of success - but it may also inspire you to try something newer, more efficient, quieter, etc.

[NREES87]

Hi -
 
These older boxes can work, but they can also be a pain.  It will have enough horsepower to run unRAID and 4GB of RAM is sufficient.  You could definitely stand up a basic NAS with it.  But, these old boxes tend to be heavy, loud, power inefficient and run hot.  And if it only takes SAS hard drives then that further limits your options.  You can give it a try (it's free with an unRAID trial license) and I'm sure you'll have some degree of success - but it may also inspire you to try something newer, more efficient, quieter, etc.

The choice of disks is not an issue as (from my understanding) the SAS backplane will accept SATA drives - plus we've got a box full of SAS drives in the office that are free for scavenging.

My boss is almost positive that there's a box here somewhere I can scavenge not RAM from - which could bump it a fair bit.

I don't expect it to be very quiet or energy efficient. Noise isn't an issue as it'll live in my server cab in my home office.

I think I'm probably going to give it a go with the free license and use it to cut my teeth on. By the time I grow out of it, our swathe of HP Proliant microservers should be ready for decommissioning

Nate

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[tdallen]

Sounds like you’ve got the right approach, good luck and let us know how it goes!

[Shockracer]

Did you even have any luck with the PE 2900? I just picked one up with 32GB with the hopes of trying out Unraid but I've been limited on what it wants to do. Half the time it will act like it's doing something but stops giving signals to my monitor. 

[bamhm182]

I would recommend against it just because if how loud it's going to be. It's likely to only accept 2TB drives at most. You MIGHT be able to flash an HBA into IT mode to bypass this, but idk if it would be worth it.