After over a decade of limping along with the same ancient Pentium 3 and 4 “servers”, I decided to finally throw some money at the problem. Some of these servers were actually laptops, and the best/most recent machine was a box I built for Mythtv…in 2004. 32-bit, PATA, oh my.

I picked up a Dell Poweredge R710 barebones (dual 870W power supplies, dual heatsinks, PERC 6/i, iDRAC enterprise, no RAM, no CPU) on Ebay then configured it to my liking with other Ebay or Amazon purchases: dual L5640’s, 48GB (6 x 8GB) RAM, H200 RAID card. I started with the LFF model, which supports 6 3.5″ drives in the front hotswap sleds. Since this will be a hyperconverged (computer and storage) host, these will house multi-terabyte HDD’s. More on that later. I can expand the RAM up to 12 (full speed) or 18 sticks if I need to.

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