ECC RAM in HP Proliant Servers/Build advice

[therunningotaku]

I'm wondering - someone I know retired some servers from 2010, they're HP rack-mounted 2U servers with a buncha vertical SAS drives in the front (probably the RX2660) - I was wondering if it was possible to add 3.5 inch drives to it (anywhere I could buy a new front panel?) and if how much RAM they would usually have? I think they would be ECC RAM, right?
Would those make a good NASbox for freeNAS, if I was able to get the 8GB of RAM needed?
I'm planning to run 2 3tb drives in a mirror, so what would be the lower limits of the RAM requirements, if I can't get 8GB (I have a $0 budget)

 

[cyberjock]

No way to know, but a quick search of the RX2660 says that it supported HP-UX and Windows Server 2003. If this is true these are going to be pretty old and not useful for FreeNAS because of how little RAM they support and how expensive the higher density DIMMs will be.

I'm not sure about your comment about adding 3.5" drives. If you are saying it uses 2.5" and you want to use 3.5" it's more than just replacing a front panel. It's literally a chassis change out, so it is obviously not cost effective.

No, 8GB is the minimum. Read the warnings in the beginning of our manual. It says 8GB minimum regardless of pool size or number of users.

Overall, I'm thinking this is a dead end for you, especially if you are looking to do this "on the cheap".


Edit: According to http://www8.hp.com/h20195/v2/GetDocument.aspx?docname=c04282556 it's also Itanium. If that is the case, that's an instant show-stopper.