Hi folks
Part of re-using old but excellent equipment :
If you just want an HDD multi-bay enclosure -- a decent 4 bay one (with RAID etc --cheaper ones don't have RAID, and usually need all HDD's to be the same size) costs around 300 USD (inc tax). For around 90 USD you can get a used 4 bay Proliant GEN 8 Microserver with 16GB RAM which isn't much physically larger than a decent 4 bay stand alone enclosure --so load up an OS , plug disks in connect to LAN and you're in busines.
Added to which you can swap the built in DVD device for an SSD, boot from a USB device (both external and internal), 4 X ext USB2 ports, 2 USB 3 ports 2 Ethernet Lan @ 1 Gbps. VGA built in video but you can add a half height PCI card if you want HDMI graphics --but it's a SERVER so remote SSH should be fine if you know what you are doing. Just load up any Linux or Windows on it up to and including W10 (it's an MBR box so not for Win 11-- but again if it's primaily a disk / video / /backup / storage server then it's 100% fit for purpose - and as it's built as a server it is built for 24/7 operation.
And in fact IMO these are far better than some current dedicated NAS boxes with a proprietary OS (QNAP type of things).
The only limitation is that the CPU is a Celeron but it's 100% fine as a NAS server. Change for XEON's if you want to run a load of VM's on that host --plenty of decent older XEON's around for cheap prices. Note no prob though in having the VM's stored on these boxes and run them remotely from other machines -- just store the VM's as your data disks.
So you can gave plenty of storage where you don't have to be switching the external bay between machines and the 1Gbps double ethernet should be more than adequate enough for data transer over your local LAN.
Another trick is to feed the ethernet to a small cheap unmanaged switch which then gets fed to a dual fast WIFI extender - so even more flexible.
Just shove the thing in a closet and forget it --these things don't need the latest software / hardware updates for the simple jobs they have to do.
I'm all in favour of new stuff but for really simple tasks and minimising moving hardware between computers plus minimising cabling you really can't beat this for simplicity and cheapness !!!!. Plus it saves using landfill too.
here's a decent youtube video on how to change processor etc. Very easy
Cheers
jimbo
Part of re-using old but excellent equipment :
If you just want an HDD multi-bay enclosure -- a decent 4 bay one (with RAID etc --cheaper ones don't have RAID, and usually need all HDD's to be the same size) costs around 300 USD (inc tax). For around 90 USD you can get a used 4 bay Proliant GEN 8 Microserver with 16GB RAM which isn't much physically larger than a decent 4 bay stand alone enclosure --so load up an OS , plug disks in connect to LAN and you're in busines.
Added to which you can swap the built in DVD device for an SSD, boot from a USB device (both external and internal), 4 X ext USB2 ports, 2 USB 3 ports 2 Ethernet Lan @ 1 Gbps. VGA built in video but you can add a half height PCI card if you want HDMI graphics --but it's a SERVER so remote SSH should be fine if you know what you are doing. Just load up any Linux or Windows on it up to and including W10 (it's an MBR box so not for Win 11-- but again if it's primaily a disk / video / /backup / storage server then it's 100% fit for purpose - and as it's built as a server it is built for 24/7 operation.
And in fact IMO these are far better than some current dedicated NAS boxes with a proprietary OS (QNAP type of things).
The only limitation is that the CPU is a Celeron but it's 100% fine as a NAS server. Change for XEON's if you want to run a load of VM's on that host --plenty of decent older XEON's around for cheap prices. Note no prob though in having the VM's stored on these boxes and run them remotely from other machines -- just store the VM's as your data disks.
So you can gave plenty of storage where you don't have to be switching the external bay between machines and the 1Gbps double ethernet should be more than adequate enough for data transer over your local LAN.
Another trick is to feed the ethernet to a small cheap unmanaged switch which then gets fed to a dual fast WIFI extender - so even more flexible.
Just shove the thing in a closet and forget it --these things don't need the latest software / hardware updates for the simple jobs they have to do.
I'm all in favour of new stuff but for really simple tasks and minimising moving hardware between computers plus minimising cabling you really can't beat this for simplicity and cheapness !!!!. Plus it saves using landfill too.
here's a decent youtube video on how to change processor etc. Very easy
Cheers
jimbo
Last edited:
My Computer
System One
-
- OS
- Windows XP,7,10,11 Linux Arch Linux
- Computer type
- PC/Desktop
- CPU
- 2 X Intel i7
