June 11, 20242 yr I've recently come into possession of a pair of Dell Poweredge r710 servers. They look pretty old, but are in superb condition - and I got them for free so can't complain 😁 There are no drives (something to do with GDPR) but the CPUs, PSUs, RAM, fans and ethernet ports etc all work fine. I've seen a lot of folks with home labs, and am very blessed that a way to "join the club" fell into my lap. With that said.. what kinds of things can/should I do with them? Unraid and use it as a Plex server along with a low profile Intel A310 for hardware transcoding? TrueNAS and use it as a means of sharing family photos using Immich? Alma Linux and run Scrypted in a Docker container so I can get my Ring doorbell to show up in the Apple Home app? OpenMediaVault and use it as a Steam cache? Ubuntu and use it to run Llama or some other large language model? Very interested to hear your thoughts/suggestions!
February 21, 20251 yr Be careful as those servers draw a lot of electricity. The electric will cost more than the value of the server. Perhaps you can install low voltage CPU and RAM to reduce the server power draw. Or you can sell them for one newer generation poweredge that is more energy efficient, maybe even a tower Edited February 21, 20251 yr by nationwidebw
February 21, 20251 yr Author Both servers are still up in the loft, unused for precisely that reason! That and cooling them in summer would be a challenge. I've since been blessed to have picked up a Lenovo V50t for free - and am using that as my home server. Living a bit on the edge as my 8TB HDD is running without any sort of parity. But that's what paycheques are for, right? 😂 It's currently got an i5 10400 and 32 GB of RAM, which does a decent job running Immich, a Minecraft Bedrock server, Plex, Steam cache and an almost fully functional Windows 11 webtop through a Docker container (https://github.com/dockur/windows). I say "almost" because I've not figured out how to passthrough the iGPU in a way that makes it able to use QuickSync yet 😅 I've put a slimline UHD drive in for 4K HDR Blu Ray Plex rips, and a 2.5 GbE adaptor for editing videos on my main PC. I love the idea of swapping out the motherboard and CPUs in the PowerEdges for something more efficient! Will definitely be looking into that 🦾 Are you running a home server?
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