Facebook Marketplace Workstation, eBay Upgrades, and Shucked Drives

[knipster]

Found a Dell T5500 Workstation for $50 on Facebook Marketplace.
Upgraded it to Dual Xeon x5675 with 48GB of ECC Registered Ram for another $200.
Put in 4-8TB shucked drives (3 WD Reds from My Book/Elements external usb drives + 1 Seagate Easystore)
Added a sale price GTX1050Ti for added Plex HW Accelerated Encoding.

I'm super thrilled with how much capacity I have to run all my home media management as docker containers + multiple VMs.   

[rollieindc]

Sounds like a nice buy on a nice rig, Knipster.

 

First, I'd add a UPS battery back up, if you don't already have one. Which disk controller is in it? For me, I'd probably be thinking about adding an NVME M.2/SSD cache drive and for the VMs (500GB-1TB), and maybe some removable drive bay slots. The new drive bay systems don't even require a sled, just slap in the 2.5 or 3.5 SATA/SAS drive in the slot and close the door. Are you going to make one of the drives a parity drive? I would if it was my machine. 🙃