Dell Poweredge 2850; Dud or deal?

[John Nas]

Having been persuaded away from trying to recycle my haul of old consumer grade and non-ECC hardware I have been shopping around for used enterprise kit and found a listing on Craiglist for a Dell Poweredge 2850. Fairly old, but with dual xeon, 700w psu(s) and support for up to 16gb ECC I was wondering if it would work.

Headlines:

* Two Intel Xeon's (Nocona) 64bit 3.00GHz, 1Mb L2 cache, 800MHz FSP, TDP 103W, VID Voltage Range 1.287V-1.4V.
* 8GB DDR2 pc2-3200-333 ECC Reg Server DIMMs

Details:

PSU #1 : Dell, Model # NPS-700AB A. 700W Max. Input; 100V - 240V ~ /10.1A, 50Hz - 60Hz. Output; +12vDC /57.3A, +3VsbDC /5.2A (Hot Swappable)

PSU #2 : Dell HIPOT, Model # 7000814-0000. 700W Max. Input; 100V - 240V ~ /10.1A, 50Hz - 60Hz. Output; +12vDC /57.3A, +3VsbDC /5.2A (Hot Swappable)

Riser Card : P/N U3480 Fox. 3 PCI3 PCIX 133MHz. Includes DDR2 DIMM Slot w/ MT9HTF3272Y-40EB2 Dell Ram 256MB PC2-3200R. 256MB, DDR@, 400, CL3, ECC, REG.
: Has two Fox Conn (SCSI Ports Labled A/B; A in use)

HDD : (DOES NOT COME WITH HDD'S!!!) Supports Six 3.5in SCSI Hotswappable Hard Disk Drives Up To 15k RPM.
: Comes With Six 3.5in HDD Hotswap Treys (SCSI MX-OH726-70920)

Has disk drive and floppy drive. Back I/O: 1 RS-232 com port, 1 VGA port, 1 Mouse PS2 port, 1 Keyboard PS2 port, two GB LAN ports, two USB ports. Front I/O: 1 VGA LCD Status Display

----

I have 3x brand new 6TB Nas drives to install into simple a mirror right now and my current intent is to set up a storage server for my small home business. To my untrained eye this would appear to match the system requirements and include some nice-to-haves like psu redundancy. Does anyone have any opinions on how suitable this might be?

 

[Ender117]

DDR2——this is way too old, you will be struggling to find parts for it

I recently found out that we have a Pentium M desktop in our lab, which was likely more than 10 years old, yet it can still manage to run win7. This one is probably even older

 

[Jailer]

Definitely a DUD.

 

[rvassar]

I recently ran a system of similar vintage, a Dell Poweredge SC1430 with dual Xeon X5355's and 16Gb of ECC DDR2. It had just enough PCIe support to configure an LSI SAS HBA. I had to run the onboard Broadcom 1GbE NIC, and an old Intel PCI 1GbE NIC to satisfy my network needs.

Overall... It was loud, produced an obscene amount of heat, and could only handle 4x 3.5" SATA drives without hacking. The 120w per CPU TDP was so bad I pulled a CPU and ran it with an empty socket...

But it worked, it ran FreeNAS 11.x just fine. I paid all of $14 for it back in 2015. :D

 

[John Nas]

You're telling me $70 *IS* too good to be true? :)

So all in, as my search continues, what are the drawbacks from a machine like this that I need to keep an eye on? More CPU cores? clock? faster RAM? FreeNas requirements just list 64-bit multi-core, >8GB (ECC recommended), all of which this noisy old dinosaur ticked.

 

[rvassar]

You're telling me $70 *IS* too good to be true? :)

So all in, as my search continues, what are the drawbacks from a machine like this that I need to keep an eye on? More CPU cores? clock? faster RAM? FreeNas requirements just list 64-bit multi-core, >8GB (ECC recommended), all of which this noisy old dinosaur ticked.

Some environmental & business requirements might help here. Can you accommodate a rack mount? Or would you prefer a tower format? Is noise / heat an issue? Performance requirements? Expected capacity / number of disks? Lifecycle vs. budget? How many years of service are expected?

 

[HoneyBadger]

Dud or deal?

"Dumpster fire."

So all in, as my search continues, what are the drawbacks from a machine like this that I need to keep an eye on? More CPU cores? clock? faster RAM? FreeNas requirements just list 64-bit multi-core, >8GB (ECC recommended), all of which this noisy old dinosaur ticked.

It's not that FreeNAS won't run, it's that you'll probably burn through another $70 every couple months in electricity consumption and cooling costs keeping an old relic like this ticking. It will also be loud - like "enough to drown out conversation in the next room" loud - and likely have parts that are old and have bugs that were generally addressed by "replace it with newer hardware"

All while being slower than a modern system costing little more that has none of those drawbacks.

 

[John Nas]

Some environmental & business requirements might help here. Can you accommodate a rack mount? Or would you prefer a tower format? Is noise / heat an issue? Performance requirements? Expected capacity / number of disks? Lifecycle vs. budget? How many years of service are expected?

Rack mount is fine, but yes noise and heat will be an issue since the server won't be given a dedicated space, so can't be too disruptive to working environment. Expected capacity is 3x6TB in a priority pool (mirrored) and 2x1TB that we have hanging around in a low priority 'nice to have' pool.

Performance requirements are 1-3 workstations accessing the storage for onsite back-up and centralized file sharing. We mostly do graphics and video work. So the NAS will be the primary backup location (we have a secondary offsite) for archiving completed projects and saving to for current project files. Source media is kept local on the workstations so we don't require much network throughput or read/write performance. Don't expect to run many if any other services, maybe a media server for office movie night?

Most budget is eaten up by other business needs so desire is what I imagine everyone would like, cheap as possible for as long as it can last.

 

[rvassar]

Most budget is eaten up by other business needs so desire is what I imagine everyone would like, cheap as possible for as long as it can last.

I'll suggest you want at least a "DDR3" filter.

 

[John Nas]

"Dumpster fire."

Ooof!

It's not that FreeNAS won't run, it's that you'll probably burn through another $70 every couple months in electricity consumption and cooling costs keeping an old relic like this ticking. It will also be loud - like "enough to drown out conversation in the next room" loud - and likely have parts that are old and have bugs that were generally addressed by "replace it with newer hardware"

All while being slower than a modern system costing little more that has none of those drawbacks.

I did worry that it looked to be a machine far more suited to a data center, but I am finding it hard to find any equipment more akin to what I have seen others using for a price point even close to that. Most budget builds I put together are >$300. I know that's pretty damn cheap for a NAS, but it's harder to squeeze into our budget and to justify over using the existing equipment.

 

[Ender117]

Ooof!



I did worry that it looked to be a machine far more suited to a data center, but I am finding it hard to find any equipment more akin to what I have seen others using for a price point even close to that. Most budget builds I put together are >$300. I know that's pretty damn cheap for a NAS, but it's harder to squeeze into our budget and to justify over using the existing equipment.

Search on eBay for a R510?

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Dell-Power...AOSwq9Zbls4L:sc:FedExHomeDelivery!43235!US!-1

Mind you you will need to add a HBA which is another 50.

For your need you may also look into a off-the-shelf unit like Synology. Performance is not stellar but should be able to handle a few backup. Also 3 HDD is a really awkward place, I would do 2 disk mirror or 4 disk stripped mirror.

 

[John Nas]

I'll suggest you want at least a "DDR3" filter.

Any others I should bare in mind? I assume the best way to go about it is pick CPU target, then find a board with appropriate socket and supporting ECC DDR3/4. Check the onboard Lan and SATA support, then build out rest of machine with as much mem as you can (min 8GB) and whatever case & PSU fits your needs.

If that is the case, are there guidelines on what CPU lines and families would do well in a budget low performance build? I don't foresee our requirements changing much in the next few years, and were they to, it would likely mean we're in a position to invest in more significant upgraded hardware anyway.

 

[John Nas]

For your need you may also look into a off-the-shelf unit like Synology. Performance is not stellar but should be able to handle a few backup. Also 3 HDD is a really awkward place, I would do 2 disk mirror or 4 disk stripped mirror

Off the shelf was definitely considered but having been a tinkerer with nas4Free at home for a number of years, I came to feel like significant data should only be trusted to a modern file system like ZFS.

I discussed 2/3/4 mirrors on here on another thread which I found insightful, as a noob at least. https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/lower-ram-requirement-for-raid1.68811/

 

[HoneyBadger]

Given your stated requirement of "five drives in a quiet tower form factor" I'd look for something like the Dell PowerEdge T110. PMing you a link (so no one poaches it!) to a fifty-dollar one in the USA with a Xeon X3430/8GB RAM - it's missing one of the hard drive trays, so you'd have to pick up an extra - and then add a 5.25" to 3.5" mounting bracket to install your fifth drive in the second optical bay.

You can also go with the second-generation T110 (T110 II) that uses Sandy Bridge processors, and has a higher max RAM capacity (32GB vs 16GB) but those will be a little more (maybe $150 for a good example with a Xeon and 16GB?)

 

[John Nas]

PMing you a link (so no one poaches it!) to a fifty-dollar one in the USA with a Xeon X3430/8GB RAM

Thanks for the link! Just learned of a computer recycler in the local area so with that as a template machine I thought I might go dumpster diving through their inventory first to see what the same hundred bucks might get me.

You can also go with the second-generation T110 (T110 II) that uses Sandy Bridge processors, and has a higher max RAM capacity (32GB vs 16GB) but those will be a little more (maybe $150 for a good example with a Xeon and 16GB?)

When speccing out a machine and assessing the value of older vs newer is there a general rule of thumb you use for correlating age with obsolescence and MTF? I know the importance of ECC Ram is a worn debate, but what of the risk if any from using 10yr+ hardware. Presumably if you're buying enterprise grade it was built for reliability but also has seen significant 'mileage' in it's lifetime.

I assume the lack of ECC RAM would be the disqualified against the current hardware I inherited which is of a similar vintage to the T110:

Rack mount, intel i5-2500k, gigabyte GA-Z68MA-D2H-B3 mobo with 2x4GB sticks of Kingston DDR3 HyperX Blu.

 

[HoneyBadger]

When speccing out a machine and assessing the value of older vs newer is there a general rule of thumb you use for correlating age with obsolescence and MTF?

That balance is dependent on the use case. I'd never go before DDR3 for the power consumption/heat reasons alone.

For an "extreme low budget" system, I'll go back to the X3400 or 5600-series Xeons, but I'd prefer to go with the Sandy Bridge (eg: E3-12xx) Xeons. Decent idle power consumption wins can be had by going up to the Haswell (Xeon v3) series but whether or not it justifies the additional initial spend is an exercise for the buyer to decide. If I need an NVMe SLOG device, I'll be sure to gun for a v2 Xeon so I get PCIe 3.0 support. Beyond that, the v4 and newer Xeon platforms use DDR4 which still costs a significant chunk more, so I'm avoiding those for now.

Reliability wise, the only real "wear items" tend to be hard drives and potentially fans. Running a CPU hard doesn't damage it unless it was poorly cooled, and you're far more likely to see that in a consumer desktop than even SoHo gear - enterprise hardware typically isn't shy about ramping its fan speed up to "hair dryer" if it thinks it's getting too warm.

That inherited hardware would make a fantastic gaming rig; a ZFS server, not so much. ;)

 

[John Nas]

For an "extreme low budget" system, I'll go back to the X3400 or 5600-series Xeons, but I'd prefer to go with the Sandy Bridge (eg: E3-12xx) Xeons. Decent idle power consumption wins can be had by going up to the Haswell (Xeon v3) series but whether or not it justifies the additional initial spend is an exercise for the buyer to decide. If I need an NVMe SLOG device, I'll be sure to gun for a v2 Xeon so I get PCIe 3.0 support. Beyond that, the v4 and newer Xeon platforms use DDR4 which still costs a significant chunk more, so I'm avoiding those for now.

Idle power *is* an important factor since I imagine the box, excluding any automated snapshots and scrubbing, will be sitting unaccessed for the vast majority of the time. Maybe receiving one automated push for a file backup from 1-2 workstations, once an hour or perhaps even as low as once a day.

The hardware recommendation guide puts Xeon in the heavy usage camp, and lists Pentium G--- and i3-- for light and medium usage respectively, but that was last revised 2016. A quick eBay search has the E3-1220 and Intel Pentium G4400 hovering around the same price despite what appears to be an obvious performance discrepancy. Do the non-xeon options have much to recommend them?

 

[HoneyBadger]

If "price was no object" you'd always pick the Xeon versus a Pentium, if they were from the same generation. Idle power is roughly the same, the Xeon would only burn more power under a sustained load - and even then, the increased performance might mean it chews through the workload faster and is able to return to idle faster (race-to-sleep) using less overall energy in the process.

For the E3-1220 vs the G4400, the latter is four years newer and on the 14nm process versus the 32nm, so it should offer significant power savings as well as having a solid improvement in IPC (instructions per clock) - basically, it'll do more work with the same GHz value.

Unless you need more than two threads, which for your described solution you likely don't, you could easily go for the G4400 in this case. You'll want to check into "total platform cost" though, as the E3-1220 will work in the Supermicro X9 series boards, and the G4400 will need an X11 series one. Although the X11 might also support the G4560, which gains hyperthreading.

 

[rvassar]

I took a good hard look at the T110 before committing to my Build #3. It came down to expansion vs. cost. I believe the original T110 has the chipset bug that prevents it from using 8Gb sticks of memory. The T110 II is fixed, but was almost double the cost. Finding a $60 tower case that could hold 10+ - 3.5" disks and a couple SSD's pushed me to DIY it from parts.

Build #3 was around $200, but I got to recycle the disks & SAS HBA. I've been quite happy with it.