I used to run an HP DL380 G7 2U rack server for my homelab, but it would have been too expensive to ship during an international house move so abandoned it during the move. In the meantime I went back to running Proxmox on my 2008 MacPro (which I did have shipped), but after a few years of service (I got it used from eBay in 2017) it’s now started to have some random hardware issues:
- the RAM has slowly been dying, stick by stick
- one of the RAM riser boards is showing a red error LED when any of the sticks are in a certain position on the board, so I think the whole board might need to be replaced
Anyway, short story is I’m down in 16GB in the Mac Pro.
In the meantime I’ve been browing r/homelab and other places, and eventually settled on the realisation that a used small form factor office desktop, like the HP Prodesk and Elitedesk PCs is more than enough for what I need (and substantially quieter). Given that you can pick them up in various specs around £100+ I even thought about getting a couple to set up a Kubernetes cluster, but I just picked up one to start with, an Elitedesk 800 G5 SFF with an i7 and 32GB. The SFF model has room inside for a few HDD and/or SDDs, and a slot on the mobo for a NVMe SDD too.
I wanted to do a stock check of what I had on the shelf that I can repurpose for the new Elitedesk – most of these were pulled from the DL380:
Purchased 2017- first HDDs in the DL380, but replaced because of the fan noise (I’m not sure if I still have these):
- HGST 7K750-500 HTS727550A9E364 (0J23561) 500GB 7200RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 2.5″
Purchased in 2017: Second set of disks added to the RAID array to my DL380:
- 2x WD Black 2.5″ 750GB
Purchased in 2019 to add additional space to the RAID array on my DL380 – these were refurbs from Amazon:
- 2x WD Blue 1TB Mobile Hard Disk Drive – 5400 RPM SATA 6 Gb/s 128MB Cache 2.5 Inch – WD10SPZX (Certified Refurbished)
The SDD that came with the Elitedesk is also used (wasn’t lucky enough to get a new one), and according to SMART it has 13300 power-on hours on it. No errors, but about half way through it’s life. Although it’s probably ok for a while I’ll probably swap it out. Now I’ve looked at the stats I may go for a new NVMe for the boot disk, and add the 2x WD Blacks for storage.
Before I start moving things around though, I need to get some SATA cables…