That's a really nice video 👍 I've been saying that for a long time - cheap old used servers might seem like a great deal, but there's a reason why people are getting rid of them. On top of the issues that you've talked about, they're also very power hungry, and it's very likely that after a year of running a server like that, you'll pay 2x its price in utilities. I'm running a dual core i3-6100 system as my main home server and it's been more than enough for all my workloads - serving files over a 10Gbit connection, running a dozen of Docker containers, sailing the seven seas, Plex, Octoprint, etc. If you have a similar workload, chances are, you don't need a 24-core dual-socket enterprise server 😁

maybe "YOU don't want a cheap used server" but in the hands of a "server guy" an HP DL380 is a fantastic piece of hardware. also server startup times are normally longer, especially on HPE servers because they do all kinds of checks before starting (that you can turn off if you want faster boot times). To avoid having to do this most people would put a hypervisor like xenserver on the metal, then put your OS on a VM so instead of having to physically restart the server you just right click the VM and restart it in like 10 seconds. The Fans however - you are spot on - way louder then expected and very scary to cats

refurbs like optiplex and hp8300 are ideal and cheap - massive value win - skip the rack servers - you don't need them - go up to a z440 or 7th gen refurbs as an upgrade path

Another option is the HP Z420. It is a mid 2010's engineering workstation for about $100-$120 barebones including shipping. It has a server motherboard which uses ECC ram and can support 6 SATA hard drives with 4 on a built in RAID controller. It has both X16 and X4 PCIe slots for both a GPU and 10G Ethernet board. Upgrade the CPU to the second fastest Xeon the server can handle, E5-2665, for $10. Used ECC ram is cheap. ~$50 for 32 Gb of 8Gb Kingston ram that only fills half of its ram slots. Look for one with the 600w power supply to better support a GPU. You want a barebones system because old disk drives are small and wear out. My system with 32 GB memory, faster CPU and no disks or GPU was about $200. A lot of bang for the buck.

I own a DL380p gen 8, and the way I fixed the fan issue was to remove the fans, then jump the pins that the yellow and 2 black wires on the fan headers (the right 3 pins when looking at it from the front). I did it by jamming a piece of a paperclip on the right side of the fan header. The server now boots and runs perfectly fine with no fans. I replaced them with much quieter ATX PC fans, and haven't had a problem.

For a dual CPU board, you are better off throwing a Type 1 Hyper Visor to better segment and utilize the whole system. Hypervisors like this are perfectly suited to multi GPU and CPU setups to segments out resources for the VMs they administer. Also allows you to make one system into many more computers underneath. The other thing is that old Server stuff can be fine but the rack mounted 1U and 2U stuff I would stay away from unless you have somewhere to isolate how loud they are. I would recommend old Tower workstations as you can still find some with multi CPU sockets if that is something you desire.

DL360p gen 8 (SFF) + Dl320e gen 8 owner here. Though I am not a big fan of Hewitt Packard, I like these servers. As you said in your video, yeah a lot of this was user error. I think a common misconception that people have in the hardware community is that a computer designed to be a server is a just a really powerful computer. In reality, memory modules on servers and processors designed for servers work in a different way; they aren't just server processors because they have more cores, there is more that goes into how they are designed that are specifically targeted at servers. You were looking for a gaming machine -- that's not a server, ultimately, was your core problem. Lol. Honestly, I think you would have done really well getting my DL320e. It has two harddrive bays, and an SDCard slot (I boot ubuntu on the sdcard slot, it is basically like having eMMC, and a laptop-size disk drive (buy a disk drive shaped 2.5inch caddy :p) for your minecraft server / storage applications. Game servers might be a good application for the DL360p, but if you have 2 12 core xeons and a limit of ~760GB of LDRAM you would probably want to be like a professional game server hoster, at that rate. You bought a machine that is intended for running web-applications asynchronously, not primarily single-threaded workloads and graphics. Your first red flag should've been how hard the graphics card was to install, lol. Also, ethernet ports have DRIVERS in windows. I don't use Windows, but it is obviously not a hardware problem if the hardware works on a different OS. e.g. my 320e is an end-of-network server that serves API requests and DNS requests and my 360p runs a web-application's server that is served to a bunch of people. The hardware needs to be put in the right context -- it is like if you gave a bad review to a shovel because it was bad at raking leaves, because you wanted a rake but both a rake and a shovel are garden tools. Cool video, but I would say it discredits these servers a little bit -- though I do think your intro provides some clarity on this not being a " server application by a deployment engineer" review of the server. Either way, thanks. Have a good day :)

Thanks for sharing your experiences. It's tough to admit when we are in over our heads, but you at least tried something that was maybe outside your comfort zone. Chalk it up to a learning experience and tune out the haters - kudos for you for not only TRYING but also having the self confidence to share the less-than-perfect outcome. KZfaq is often only about the success stories - but life doesn't always hand us a win. And that's ok.

For any kind of specialized hardware always do research! This video caught my eye since I actually bought a similar model a month back, am using it for docker game hosting. Running on Ubuntu server headless and running Factorio, 7dtd, ark, satisfactory, valheim, space engineers, avorion, and a few mc servers including direwolf. Plus storage. Running smoothly and quiet as a bug in a rug while servers are running. But to do that I had to make sure everything I smacked in there was hpe certified. And before I did any of that I made sure the platform would actually do what I wanted. Great video!

There are older cases from a few decades ago that are full ATX and are just packed full of drive bays, on top of that they make expansion cards that give you all the sata connectors you could ever want, could easily set up a pc for storage with a top of space for expansion

in the dl380p g8, you can use a "silence of the fans" custom ILO, where you can ssh into the ILO and lower or even turn off fans, it works amazing, i have a dl380p g8 running in my room 24/7 with it i see you talked about it briefly in the video, its a 5 min process

Another great video! Whoo thanks mate I just started out trying to build a server with a laptop so this is my #goals haha

You and I are going in totally different directions. I went down the server rabbit hole and have loved every moment of it. From a supermicro 256TB truenas server, to an HP DL580 G9

Great video! used server can always be the way to go, I have attempted to use one but I never could get it to work, I was going to use it for plex and keeping files safe but I gave up and gave it to a friend.

7Ps: Proper Prior Planning Prevents Piss-Poor Performance (love your content)

You are so close with your storage server. The fan control firmware is awesome. For networking I’d get a used 10gig LOM card and a used pci 10gig nic for your desktop. Truenas runs great on it. A lot of people run proxmox or esxi to combine Truenas and render VMs into one box. I keep my proxmox and Truenas on separate servers. With persistence I’ve overcome everything but the slow boot times. Hope your able to revisit you home lab one day, good luck!

With Gen8s you need to update everything to with the service pack iso using ILO, then update ILO and the newer firmware for things like the NIC. That will solve 90% of your issues. But for what you paid for those two servers you could have done a gen10 server.

Hey its good that you realized that old enterpirse servers are not usually a good choice for basic things like serving files, media server, or editing nas. Even an ssd nas with a 2.5g connection will not use a large % of a quad core haswell cpu. Consumer hardware is much less of a headake when the workload is pretty light. My nas + media server is a haswell box. My firewall is a dual core sandybridge optiplex. My proxmox machine is a 2500k with some old laptop drives in raid running a security camera server and archlinux mirror. Only my remote gaming rig is x99, and only because i need all 40 pcie lanes for 3 gpus haha. My point is that for most *home* server tasks serving 1-2 users, you dont need enterprise hardware intended to serve 100s of users.

loved the cat cameo lmao

I have 4 servers like this in a stack in my office. I haven't fired them up in a couple years but they seem too nice too trash. I pretty much had the same epiphany. Now my file server/git/processing server uses my last desktop motherboard and an industrial PC chassis. When I upgrade my main PC, I cycle the motherboards down for file server usage. The cloud has replaced self hosting so I don't need to host powerful hardware anymore. They're good for what they were designed for but, not great when re-purposed.

I relate so much, free electric so I've been buying old servers to cpu/hard drive crypto mine and it's been headaches and mistakes

I wound up getting 4 DL380E Gen8's for free about 2 years ago when I bought a server rack for around $50. Guy was getting rid of things due to his wife. I was planning on making a proxmox cluster out of 3 and have the 4th as basically spare parts. hope I won't run into any issues when I get around to actually working on it.

Let me know what you want to know. I’m running hp dl380 g8’s with unraid. E5-2697 v2’s. Seen one with a 2080 super in it. You can run ssds but remember the controller is not designed for that. Sas drives are cheap and enterprise grade. I put mine in the basement to cut down on noise. I remote into my windows 11 server and done. Further I can go to wherever, remote into home, convert whatever I need and send it to myself. You are on the right track!

I picked up a GL360p yesterday for $50 and this popped up in my feed today.

i'm using ml350p gen8 and it works well with my RTX 2070 and pcie nvme adapter(cant boot on it, but see drive) with 2* xeon e5 2680 v2 bought 40€ and 256gb ddr3 1866 bought 140€, so it's budget, works well on most games but consumes a lot more power and the fan isn't too noisy, but definetly more noisy than my gf computer with fx 9590 ;)

I owned a few used workstations myself and yes, most of them are really noisy. My biggest issue today is that the interesting machines - dual CPU with lots of memory - need a big power supply and they are most likely proprietary so you cannot replace a broken one easily. So I decided to keep away from used machines even if I get them from big vendors with good warranty and a big catalog of replacement parts. ( My company used over 200 blades once but shortly after the warranty period all blade centers but two broke down so we could only keep little over 20 blades alive. 180 fine Linux PCs broken because of some proprietary connectors to the outside world ... 200 cheap Linux towers would still run, or can easily be fixed with cheap parts ...).

So instead of a server you ended up with a line cook.

Sounds like we share similar flavor of insanity. I bought a 360p g8 as a second server for backups and testing. The novelty of enterprise gear has faded. I still have the server racked and active but rely on WOL heavily to minimize power draw. It was a fun experiment.

I got the fan hack installed, installed my drives on the outside of the server and switched the drive controller to HBA mode, and powered them with a spare PSU. Using Proxmox to manage VMs, and got 200GB of RAM for dirt cheap on eBay. Boot drive is using the robbed SATA connection from the DVD-ROM. Lots of workarounds, but it's a decent machine. Screw HP for making it so stupid though.

I'm subscribing just for the honesty. LOL

I got my dual cpu rack server kicks with a dell poweredge r720! Working well as my unraid server but yea its noisy too but i already knew it would be from the dell poweredge r410 it replaced lol

A high end used Dell workstation with dual cpu's is a good solution, such as a Dell Precision Tower 7810 Desktop.

An old Workstation is in many ways better than an old Server. I startet with one, a HP Z240-Tower-Workstation for just 150€ with a Intel Xeon Prozessor E3-1270 v2, 16GB RAM, a Quadro 2000 and I a 1TB HDD. I put also an used old SSD of mine for the Boot Drive in. It had enough power for a Hypervisor, so that I could run multiple VMs on it. For just Storage a simple NAS (like QNAP or Synology) would be enough. I am building with one right now, so I can Backup all my Games, DCs, DVDs and other things. Also if anybody knows, is there an easy way (besides a Nextcloud) to sync files between many devices? I am currently using a Nextcloud to do this, but sometimes the sync doesn't work well.

You said that its reaching above gigabit speeds on a single file transfer but gigabit 125MB/s, so its almost gigabit but not above gigabit, sounds like software issue to me, maybe its the driver

A little late to comment but.. If you want dual Xeon's try a HP Z station or a Dell Precision. This is the route I took, very quiet. BTW I also have Gen8 and 9 rack mount machine as well, they are for virtualization. Last note, HP servers do not like any hardware adds if it is not HPE and will announce so by ramping the fans up.

im gonna buy couple sever sometime in future. i think ill become tom cruise from ghost protocol after that.

I want to get a refurbished HP or Dell so bad, but they're so expensive to get in my country.

Windows Storage Spaces a re e a huge improvement over the old disk management tool

as someone whos doing homelab ill mention this, Workstations are wonderful *QUIET* servers for the most part, i recently switched to a supermicro "workstation" which is only drawing about 200w with 10 drives. its a 4U/Tower that has been rackmounted. 6x14tb zfs Raid. 2x2tb NVME striped.

Now I wanna buy a cheap used server.... (who am I kidding I already wanted to do that)

**clicks on video** **sees an hp gen8** **instant flashbacks**

Thankyou, although still interested you stopped me from buying crap and banging my head for 6 months

I understand you and geeking with this stuff, but why not just buy a Synology nas 😁 or buy a small form factor hp elitedesk or thinclient (mini pc)

without PCIE cards the fans very rarely spin up.

Someone didn't do his 1 hour research before buying a server

I don't know why you throwed away 30 $ on tesla K20 if you can buy for like 80$ Tesla P4. That small card actually has gtx 1080 core and 8gb of VRAM and it has 75W TDP so it has no additional power connectors. Only downside is that not have any video outputs and only way to make it rendering anything is having IGPU or some nvidia quadro and editing windows registry to make it render certain apps on Tesla and then display it via that IGPU or quadro.

Yeah, you really didn't think it through..

This is really the worst use case for that server, if like me you host VM's this server is perfect for that, although I agree about the power consumption, especially from a house.

ECC RDIMM is a type of hardware you wont get any time soon on consumer market :) only used enterprise :)

I'm getting a HP Proliant DL380 G7. Why? Because somebody's giving it to me. 48Gb RAM. Eight x 2.5" drive bays. I got a Dell R310 from this guy and he decided to give away the HP for free. How can I say no 😊

A 2.5 Giga**bit** per second ( gbps ) transfer is 125 Mega**bytes** per second tranfer ( MB/s )

Hey, have you tried Chat GPT to troubleshoot your problems?

Get a g9 and use e5 2600 v4. Hp can be very finnicky. I run a lenovo x3650 m5. Try one of those. I have an nvme drive in it, a gpu, and a few drives and the fans only stay around 49%. Your main issue is going with a g8. Any server or enterprise equipment is better suited to a separate room due to noise. Mine came with 16gb ram and a lower end 8core 2620v4 for $200.

mine works great. less time writing a "script" more time doing actual work ??

I see a significant mismatch between your server budget and the camera/microphone setup.

Don't beat yourself up. Nerds never put a value on their time. By the time anyone navigates the minefield of firmware, hardware & software compatibility plus poorly documented software, it costs way more than claimed. Reminds me of the early days when nerds claimed you can just compile a program if you don't have the binary, yeah sure, what a rabbit hole that is ...

For the love of god (and short boot up times), avoid HP/SuperMicro.

poor kittens..

cant believe this guy doesnt have more subscribers

Heart Problems

PROXMOX

this whole video is one giant facepalm

Please stop the incessant music.

First!

Like you said at the beginneing of this video you dont know what the hell you're doing. 'OMG i bought a data center server and it loud and the fans run' you should at least remove the HP proliant from the title as it implyes that the server was faulted or not performing.

Yeah DL360 is much more louder my dude buying enterprise grade hardware and expecting it to be quiet LOL Bruh just do some research on it before buying, theres tons of videos... You can go in bios and make fans work only whe nneeded, also power saving mode helps with it alot! P.S. Only buy 360 and 380p if it says p at the end "stands for performance, they are just unkillable and better quality built + can run twice as long as regular one and e, i think e is the worst tbh

And then you learn that desktop pc exist and do the same thing as a rack server, because a server it's just a pc. I don't understand why people like complicating their life.

wish i had that scrap cash to throw at Hopes and Dreams... i still got a old hp wx9300... i have dreams of finally buying the ram it needs and a second heat sink to fully realize its Dual socket opteron 270 old school goodness.. but alas... no such thing exists in communist chinada... scrap cash..dont exist.. its communism here... 3rd world living in canada.. a so called 1st world... pfft...