I recently bought a server from eBay to replace the duties of my storage server (depot). depot will become my web server. I needed to do this because my web server was an Atom D510 based system. I need more RAM than can be addressed with an Atom D510. I also wanted ECC memory in my storage server since I’m about to start using ZFS pools and can use the integrity provided by ECC.
The server I bought is overkill for my current needs, but it was inexpensive because it’s older technology. It is a Supermicro X8DTN+ motherboard with a pair of Xeon L5640 CPUs and 48G of registered ECC RAM (six 8G sticks). It’s in a Supermicro SC826 chassis with a BPN-SAS-826EL backplane. This wasn’t the backplane I wanted; the eBay description was incorrect. However, it’ll work for my needs since I don’t really need more than 4 SAS lanes. As an upside, the cabling is cleaner than SFF to SATA breakout cables. I’m using an LSI 9211-8i PCIe x4 HBA to connect the backplane to the motherboard.
As an aside, I’ve never owned a machine with 12 CPU cores that can run 24 hyperthreads. While the L5640 runs at a paltry 2.26GHz, it is very handy to be able to run gmake -j24 when doing software development. I’m using a Crucial MX100 512G SSD as my OS drive, because it was inexpensive (an Amazon Prime Day deal). I would normally choose a Samsung 850 Pro, but I couldn’t justify the price for setting up this machine. I can always change it later. At any rate, compiles of my software are speedy on this machine, which means I can get back to finishing my BGP-4 development along with some other things.
The new machine is named kiva (thanks to Julie for the name!). Other than the Crucial MX100, it has an HGST 4TB Deskstar that will host backups of other machines. Backups of kiva are currently going to another HGST 4TB Desktar in depot. kiva is running FreeBSD 10.2-BETA2 (i.e. 10.1-STABLE on its way to 10.2). It is mounted in the rack, but I’ll likely change its position later.