Replacing a Personal Rack-Mounted Server?

Starky writes "Many moons ago, I cobbled together a 1U rack mount from parts which has since been diligently serving up my homepage and web sites for family and friends. It's a truly "Mom and Pop Shop" setup, running on a rack secluded in a closet at home over a DSL line. At the time, I was able to piggyback my order on a large order placed by a company for which I was working, allowing me to get a substantial discount. Now, the time has come to consider a replacement. However, I no longer work at a company that orders chassis and chips by the dozen. I would like to get a rack-mountable chassis, but don't know where to go as a lowly individual consumer looking for a box with minimal specifications (1 processor, dual drives, and 1G RAM is about all I need) at a reasonable price. Any recommendation from Slashdotters who maintain their own rigs?"

Reuse the chassis

[eln (21727)]

The rack-mounted chassis is what costs more than the normal PC parts, so just re-use the one you already have and order the rest of it from anywhere. You should be able to buy what you're looking for for less than $400 if you don't have to order the chassis.

Consider the Geode

[dj245 (732906)]

I would consider an AMD Geode chip. It likely faster than you need, and you can get a motherboard/cpu/heatsink combo for around $100. They usually take DDR1 memory and 1GB DDR1 is very inexpensive. Video is built in, like most proper server boards. The power savings will probably be substantial over a "server motherboard" type computer also.

Re:Consider the Geode or a Via C7

[LWATCDR (28044)]

I have seen Via cpu/motherboard combos on newegg for under $50. Really cheap and low power. The motherboard for the GPC that Walmart was selling also runs about $50.

Re:

[Loualbano2 (98133)]

If you cannot reuse the current chassis, I would take a look at these guys:

www.plinkusa.net

They have about the dirt cheapest bare rackmount chassis and accessories that I have run across.

ft

Shop around

[Pengo (28814)]

You can get a low cost dell server for cheap, 1u or even cheaper if you go with a low end desk-side server.

Why do you need a rack mount? Seems like for a home server a quiet desk-side server would be easier to keep cool and quiet, and more space conservative.

Re:

[emag (4640)]

You can get a low cost dell server for cheap, 1u or even cheaper if you go with a low end desk-side server.

I'm going to have to second this. As much as I loathe Dell's consumer products, and especially their laptops, I'm really in love with their rack-mount servers. The last I checked, there are often deals on low-end servers in their SMB server section. Granted, it's not going to be a $199 PC, but it's still in the "reasonable" realm for rackmount... (ie, just speccing out a 1U PowerEdge R200 using the specs given, it comes in at under $1k. If you look at over the course of "many moons", that's a decent pr

Re:

[Sentry21 (8183)]

If your quality/reliability target is that of 'off the shelf' parts anyway, you can get the R200 for around five hundred bucks and spend another five hundred upgrading the hard drive and ram. Heck, you could hit 2x2G of ram and 2x1TB SATA hard drives for not that much more. If you don't need a DRAC then you're saving a nice chunk of change at that price point.

Desktop chassis is more appropriate

[Ted Cabeen (4119)]

The one thing I will note about rackmount servers is that they are all very noisy. For home installation, a desktop chassis will nearly always fit your needs and will be much quieter and more power-efficient than a rackmount. I recently replaced my home server with about $850 in parts from newegg. If you're interested in making a quiet desktop, take a look at SilentPCReview [silentpcreview.com].

If you're set on a rackmount server, I've been very happy with Silicon Mechanics [siliconmechanics.com], but their cheapest machine is still ~$1000.

Just upgrade

[LWATCDR (28044)]

NewEgg or ZipZoomFly have motherboards, CPUs, Drives, and memory. But the big question is why update? What is wrong with the current server? I am sure you could saturate that DSL line with the server you have so why upgrade? Maybe just upgrade the disk? Or maybe more memory.

Your other option is to watch Geeks.com. Every now and then they have cheap refurbished servers.

Re:

[frank_adrian314159 (469671)]

But the big question is why update?

To impress the babes, dude!

Pogo Linux

[mauryisland (130029)]

Pogo Linux [pogolinux.com] has some nice gear for cheap.

Re:

[Culture20 (968837)]

Agreed, Pogo's stuff is good, and their people know what they're doing there. Plus, you can buy servers and workstations with or without the MS tax; your choice.

ebay!

[Grey_14 (570901)]

You really even need to ask? E-Bay! That or suck it up and just use a desktop tower, it'll take more room but give you much more flexibility on the cheap,

eBay

[ReverendLoki (663861)]

Actually, I've had some good luck finding older but still very very usable rackmount systems on eBay. Seems there's never a shortage of companies getting rid of year-old kit they just upgraded.

Re:

[gbjbaanb (229885)]

or buying even older kit and throwing away the P3 system that was inside it.

Go with a Barebones Rackmount

[casualsax3 (875131)]

NewEgg has some relatively inexpensive Asus and SuperMicro chassis to chose from: http://www.newegg.com/Store/SubCategory.aspx?SubCategory=8&name=Server-Barebones [newegg.com]

Dude,

[MoOsEb0y (2177)]

You're getting a Dell! Srsly tho, you can get rackmount servers from them for cheaper than you can build them yourself.

Re:

[jeffmeden (135043)]

Dead on. If you really need a rackmount server, dell has low prices on single units that you can NOT beat. But the question remains, if you only need one why the heck are you getting a rackmount? Taking a serious look at your logic behind this decision is in order. Here is a start: they DO make server-class computers without 19" rack ears on them.

Re:

[Vrallis (33290)]

While I've always been a big 'do it yourself' (coming from a geek who has a 42U rack cabinet full of servers in his living room), for 1U or 2U systems I'd say to go Dell. Their systems are reliable and dirt cheap. Try to find a vendor that offers one of their 'special buys,' which also have support contracts for 1/5th the usual cost.

surpluscomputers or geeks.com

[slashkitty (21637)]

both have slightly older rack mounted computers on the cheap. in the order of $100 - $400. I've seen a dual xeon with 4 drives for like $250.

Re:

[MyDixieWrecked (548719)]

geeks.com have just jumped on this market. They have a couple of really nice lowish-end (in terms of expandability) 1U servers that would be great for such projects. I don't know if I'd use those in my datacenter, but they're great for home use.

I was looking at some of their dual-core xeon options with 2 SATA bays. You can get one of those for $400.

Does it have to be 1U?

[Fallen Kell (165468)]

I am just wondering if it has to be 1U. You can get a nice 4U server complete for $350. It is close to your specs already. Just upgrade RAM, and add a second hard drive, possibly upgrade processor (it has an Intel 775 socket motherboard with 1066FSB Core 2 Duo processor support). So $30 for extra RAM, $60 for disk, and possibly $200 for new CPU, you are still just in the $500-600 range, which isn't bad at all. http://www.superlogics.com/rackmount-computer/rackmount-computers/SL-4U-CL-M900-HA/316-2541.htm [superlogics.com]

Heat issues in the closet?

[initself (582182)]

I am also in the market, but I am worried about heat issues in the closet. Are there servers that are more heat tolerant than others? I tried looking at some military grade stuff, but a lot of these vendors are hard to place orders with. Is there a way to build a machine that is very tolerant of heat?

Re:

[Clover_Kicker (20761)]

It's easier to just avoid making heat in the first place. Use old h/w or massively underclocked new-ish HW, with onboard video or a really crappy video card.

Ebay

[jonesy16 (595988)]

I agree with most of the points on here. 1) Rackmounts are excessively loud in "most" instances, so unless you need a small height factor or already have a rack to put it in, I'd recommend getting a desktop of some sort. Power usage should be another concern if you're going to have it running 24x7. That being said, ebay is a great place to pick up rack mount computers. One example are the IBM e326 servers which use AMD processors. You can pick up one of those for ~$250 with an Opteron 250 and 1 GB of R

Is an ask slashdot necessary for this?

[alta (1263)]

Come on, there are tons of rackable servers out there. If you don't feel like putting together parts, go to dell. They start at $800. http://www.dell.com/content/products/category.aspx/rack_optimized?c=us&cs=04&l=en&s=bsd [dell.com]

If you don't want to spend that much, go to newegg, search for 1u and enjoy the 379 results.

If you want something in between; http://www.google.com/search?q=1u+server [google.com]

There's no need to place a huge order for this type stuff. And there's no need to ask /. I guess next we'll b

System76

[Rinisari (521266)]

www.system76.com [system76.com] if you're into Ubuntu...

Where to buy a server

[JWSmythe (446288)]

My friends, their friends, and their friends (like, people I've never heard of), always end up coming to me for this same advice.

    Sometimes I give/sell them parts out of my garage, because their old equipment also somehow ends up in my garage. :)

    I tend to like SuperMicro equipment, so if you have a few bucks to spend, go find yourself a nice SuperMicro 1u. But since this is your personal machine, and you don't have a huge budget, you'll have to shop like I do.

    Check out the VisionMan machines on tigerdirect.com. For about $550, you can get a 2Ghz dual core with 1Gb RAM, 2 160Gb SATA drives

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/searchtools/search.asp?page=2&mnf=1286&sort=Price%20asc [tigerdirect.com]

    I haven't bought any yet, but if I ever run out of parts in my garage for new servers, I'll probably buy one. :)

    You can always go browsing on eBay. Sometimes you'll find a good deal, but generally you're not going to get much decent for under $500. There are resellers on there all the time, who grab up anything cheap (or bid them up to over $500), that they're going to sell to their customers. If you do, be cautious of home built machines. They're the best thing in the world if they're done right, but if they weren't, you can experience lots of nasty problems. Like, if there isn't enough air flow, the CPU can overheat, and in a week or two you may end up looking for a new machine again.

    I was building my own 1u machines for quite a while. When we approached 1Ghz, I had to start doing some special cooling. After that, since the company was making good money, it was cost effective to get the SuperMicro machines.

    The final option is... I needed an incoming mail server to filter viruses and spam. This was a rather urgent matter, and I didn't really have time to go through my garage piecing a machine together and test it. I also didn't have time to order anything. I went down to CompUSA (they re-opened close to my house), and picked up an eMachines AMD64 with 1Gb ram for $250. It's a tower case, but if I felt ambitious (which I didn't that night), I could have easily rebuilt it into a spare 2u case. The memory was not seated well when I unboxed it, but that's the only problem that it's had so far, and it's been running hard for a few weeks.

When did Ask Slashdot become a Google Replacement?

[dreamchaser (49529)]

I mean seriously, a few minutes of quality time spent with Google shows many, many low cost server options.

I tend to agree with a lot of the posters here though who ask "Why rackmount?" I see no logical reason for it other than the 'cool/geek' factor.

Re:When did Ask Slashdot become a Google Replaceme

[afidel (530433)]

Dude, you must be new here. 90+% of Ask Slashdot questions can be answered in some form by Google, people ask questions here to get a particular informed answer to the question from a group of fellow geeks.

Re:

[Just Some Guy (3352)]

I mean seriously, a few minutes of quality time spent with Google shows many, many low cost server options.

And almost all of them are worthless unless you already know exactly what you want. Hardware changes so fast that sometimes it's hard to know what the good gear is this month.

Check out Epic Systems

[JohnnyGTO (102952)]

They specialize in like new lease returned hardware, including Big Iron. I got an HP Proliant from them for a song last year. www.escorp.com

Quiet low power 1U

[DDumitru (692803)]

I have build a couple of these for colos, but they are low cost, quiet, and low power, so you might be interested.

Start with a Supermicro 1U 510. This is 11" deep with an 80+ efficiency 200W power supply. It will house most uATX motherboards, although you will have to nibble out the back panel to get non supermicro boards to fit.

Then add a low cost AMD socket-AM2 motherboard.

Put a low power 45W dual core like a BE-2400 or one of the newer series. You will need a 1U blower for this.

Put one 3.5" drive (or up to 4 2.5" drives).

With a Gigabyte board and 1 2.5" HDD + 1 2.5" SSD, my system draws 37 watts in use as measured from the power line. It is not 100% quiet, but is the quietest of any 1U I have worked with.

Hey! Me too! Help me pick a CPU

[Just Some Guy (3352)]

I'm replacing a dying server, and for various reasons I'm getting a Dell [dell.com], probably the PowerEdge 840. My questions:

• AMD or Intel? It seems like the ball's back in Intel's court these days, but I don't track hardware news so closely anymore.
• Pentium E2180 @2.0GHz (free), Core 2 Duo @2.2GHz ($50), or dual core Xeon at 1.86GHz ($100)? Cycles aren't everything, but I'm guessing that the Core 2 Duo at 18% higher clock speed ought to be the sweet spot.
• For RAM: 1GBx2 or 512MBx4? In some systems, more sticks == more interleaving == faster. In others, more sticks == more latency. What's the current thinking?
• Why doesn't Slashdot display bulleted lists correctly anymore?

To those who would tell me (and this story's poster) to Google it: I'd rather get today's recommendations from an interactive forum than try to find a website with the same information from the last year or so. Besides, what geek doesn't want to talk about hardware?

Why?

[leoxx (992)]

1 processor, dual drives, and 1G RAM is about all I need

Perhaps I am confused. Why exactly do you want a rack-mounted server for this? Why not just use an old PC, most people have scads of these things sitting around. Better yet, use something like the VIA NAS 7800 [via.com.tw] and throw it in a nice small quiet case. Compared to some crappy old 1U server, you'll save hundreds of dollars a year in electricity costs alone if the thing is on 24x7.

Rack mount is dying

[pseudorand (603231)]

Are you #()*& insane? Why would you want a rack mount anything, especially in your home? Rack stuff, especially 1U, is noisy (it has to have small fans that spin really fast) and it's an inconvenient form factor unless you really need to pack a lot of equipment into a space. The rack alone takes up 21"x42"xheight, so unless you actually need something on the order of 336 CPU cores (42U of two-way quad cores), rack mount is a horrible idea. Ditch the rack and buy yourself a Shuttle barebones P238 (no, I don't work for them, but I do have shelves, not racks, full of them and they work great). Put 8G of memory, a few Raptor HDs, and a quad core in it and the whole thing will be less than $2500 from NewEgg for a sweet system. Then, put it any where you please because it's dead quiet and always ice cold (we do weather modeling on them, so we run the CPUs at 100% for days at a time).

Use a hosting company...

[tgd (2822)]

Seriously.

I used to have a dual CPU P3 1U rackmount server I used for those sort of things. A day of running it through a Kill-A-Watt showed me it was costing almost $40 a month in electricity.

That buys a LOT of hosting when you look at places like dreamhost, etc.

Why use 1U? Use a Mac mini

[pugdk (697845)]

Seriously, I had the exact same concerns recently, however I refuse to listen to the insane noise usually coming from an 1U rack..

I bought a cheap mac mini (intel core solo) on ebay, gutted it, replaced the CPU, added 2 GB RAM and a 250 GB drive.. I then put an external 250 GB drive on top of it. Alternatively buy a brand new Mac mini with the specs you need.

There you go - $600 or so and you have a totally silent "home server".

eBay

[macdaddy (38372)]

I bought a pair of 1U dual PIIIs on eBay for about $50 each. The drive bays were missing of course but they can also be found on eBay. Toss in a couple of drives and away you go. Cheap and effective.

weird stuff warehouse

[Polo (30659)]

I got a small 1U 150w celeron system for less than $50, but you have to go in to find that kind of stuff.

They have nice current systems too.

http://www.weirdstuff.com/cgi-bin/category.cgi?category=10174 [weirdstuff.com]

highly recommended

Ebay, Craigslist, too.

[millia (35740)]

For my home server closet and rack, I found a nifty 5u unit on ebay for about $75; there's a vendor out of LA who sells them for about $40+$35 shipping on a 'buy it now' basis. It's not the best engineered case, but it was also easy to take apart and noise-reduce with massed vinyl and rubber grommets, etc.

Personally, I wanted a rack server for several reasons:
a) more space for hard drives
b) easier to fit in than putting a server on a shelf unit.
c) looks cool, and is easy to cool.

It is still loud, but it's a

Want a cheap refurb with serious geek cred?

[mr_mischief (456295)]

Consider Anysystem.com [anysystem.com], where you can get dirt-cheap Sun gear. Check out the Ugly Duckling specials for working systems with cosmetic damage dirt cheap. They sell IBM server stuff, too, but that's pretty much all marked "call for pricing".

Building your own

[prisoner-of-enigma (535770)]

Unless you're really strapped for space, you can save a good chunk of money by going with something other than a 1U chassis. 2U costs less than 1U (generally). 3U costs less than 2U, and 4U is generally way cheaper than 3U. 4U is the sweet spot since it's little more than a mid-tower case turned on its side -- not that there's anything wrong with that, of course!

There's other reasons to go with a 4U case. You can use standard PSU's in a 4U case. You can use standard PCI/PCI-X/PCI-E cards in a 4U case (

Re:

[argent (18001)]

Since this is a home server I'd second this recommendation. 1Us are great for colo because they generally charge you per rack unit, but they're really poor value for money where space isn't a premium.

Penguin Computing

[Improv (2467)]

Although I tend to go with them at work, I've been happy with Penguin Computing, and their prices are reasonable enough that they'd be good for home use too.

Rack shelves are the solution

[kriston (7886)]

First, if you're looking for inexpensive rack-mounted servers, check geeks.com which sells several machines of recent vintage.

However, you might consider this idea. I decided to be more flexible for my own home after observing a small dotcom that acquired several smaller dotcoms, some of which used towers and others that used rack mounted machines.

I opted to install a two-post rack, the kind some people call "relay racks," and I installed shelves on them. The shelves allow me to install whatever computer I want, whether rack-mounted or tower configuration. They also allow me to use non-rack-mount communications gear like routers and modems. I also have punch-down blocks at the top for cabling and power hanging off the side. Naturally your four-post 19-inch rack would have similar if not somewhat less expensive shelving available for it.

Back to my setup, the all-aluminum two-post rack came from American Power Conversion and only cost me $150.
The shelves vary from $35 to $70 each. The shelves holding the smaller gear are cantilevered and vented. The rest are center-mounted.

For your rack you can use your old rack-mounted computer as a shelf for the other components.

There shouldn't be a reason to restrict your options to just rack-mounted computers. The more flexible and less expensive tower form factors are definitely going to satisfy you more.

Re:

[shadow349 (1034412)]

I am just in the process of evaluating a new server to replace my home rack-mount.

As the previous poster mentioned, if you don't need a lot of power, the D-Link DNS323 [dns323.info] with two SATA drives might fit the bill. I just got one and put in two 500GB drives. So far, it is doing a good job replacing my home server for file serving, web serving, email, dns, dhcp, and rtorrent.

It cost about $300 ($160 for the unit, 2 x $70 for the drives on sale). The big payoff is that it uses (well, supposed to use since I haven't

Re:Are your needs that great

[B'Trey (111263)]

I've been running whitebox servers like that at home for years but recently decided, like the original poster, that I wanted to go with a rackmount setup. If you're deadset on building a custom system, then I can't offer much advise. Me, I picked up a couple of these. [geeks.com]

Even after paying shipping and picking up a could of larger hard drives, I don't think I could have build a similar system any cheaper. One is my mail/web server and the other is an internal domain controller and file server.

They don't come with rails, so they're sitting on shelves in my rack rather than actually installed but I can live with that.

Re:

[Clover_Kicker (20761)]

Why do you need that much horsepower for home?

My home file/mail server is a P233, and if anything it's overpowered for the job.

Re:

[sumdumass (711423)]

I suspect he is wanting something new for fear of something breaking or failing unexpectedly. Otherwise his used system that works right now would be as sufficient as a used system for what he described the usage for.

He could still get the basics like the chassis, power supply and maybe with a backplane for SCSI drives so they would be hot swappable. The rest of it, I would think he would want new stuff. Most ATX and extended ATX form factor main boards will work in a 1 us chassis. For a limited volume serv