Re: Poweredge 2850

"wantahomeserver" wrote in message
news:...


I have recently been given a Dell PowereEdge 2850 for free. A former
roomie was going to send it to the dump. I was searching the dumps
recently for something to use as a household media server, and this one
almost fits the bill. The dilemma is that it has a total of 72GB of
space in two SCSI hot swap drives. The largest sized compatible SCSI
drives are 300GB and cost around $300. I'm trying to do this on the
cheap and would appreciate suggestions. I could put out $300 soon but
already have over 300GB of media to store on it and would much rather
spend that much on a terabyte or two.

Buy a cheap PCI SATA (about $70.00 US) or PATA (about $30.00 US)
adapter and you're all set.

Tom L

On 12/16/2010 7:53 AM, Tom Lake wrote:
> "wantahomeserver" wrote in message
> news:...
>
>
> I have recently been given a Dell PowereEdge 2850 for free. A former
> roomie was going to send it to the dump. I was searching the dumps
> recently for something to use as a household media server, and this one
> almost fits the bill. The dilemma is that it has a total of 72GB of
> space in two SCSI hot swap drives. The largest sized compatible SCSI
> drives are 300GB and cost around $300. I'm trying to do this on the
> cheap and would appreciate suggestions. I could put out $300 soon but
> already have over 300GB of media to store on it and would much rather
> spend that much on a terabyte or two.
>
> Buy a cheap PCI SATA (about $70.00 US) or PATA (about $30.00 US)
> adapter and you're all set.
>
> Tom L
>
The system itself may not want to boot from a SATA or PATA adapter.

Thers's a reason why SCSI drives are much more expensive. They are made
for demanding 24/7 high use operation. SATA drives are not made as
well. You get what you pay for, including too damned many failures of
SATA drives. A manufacturer's 5-year warranty on a SATA drive does not
count for squat when you take into account your own time spent repairing
a system with a failed SATA drive.

That's the reason why I continue to run SCSI drives on my desktop
systems, contrary to modern practice... Ben Myers

Actually, they sell for 250 on eBay. It works fine on only one powe
supply and the fans aren't that noisy and I have an unoccupied room fo
it anyway. If it can't be used for the purpose that I want, are ther
any suggestions on how to make it useful

On 1/12/2011 12:41 AM, wantahomeserver wrote:
> Actually, they sell for 250 on eBay. It works fine on only one power
> supply and the fans aren't that noisy and I have an unoccupied room for
> it anyway. If it can't be used for the purpose that I want, are there
> any suggestions on how to make it useful?
>

with multiple large drives i suppose it could fetch that price, but
don't confuse ebay asking prices with actual market value. in other
words look at completed auctions for the sale price of items that
actually sold and not the prices that sellers wish they could sell their
equipment for.

it is a server and is great for use as a server. the dual power
supplies with automatic switching and raid controller for redundant disk
drive configurations provide exceptional up time as one would want from
a server. given its age it probably is no longer desireable as a
primary server in a organization because dell will not longer warranty
it and that means part replacement can not be assured in the event of a
failure. and given the cost of labour to configure it is hard to
justify installing anything but new in a for profit business (the cost
of the hardware becomes incidental in the face of the cost of labour and
software). it could be useful for a small non-profit that has volunteer
labour that can set it up. or it could be fun to use as a learning
machine to use to install lunix on and set it up as a web and/or mail
server. or i suppose a strapped company might use it as a backup domain
controller which wouldn't require a whole lot of memory or disk space.

good luck.