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Cheap, silent ECC rack mountable setup

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Weaksauce
Joined
Aug 12, 2013
Messages
64
I currently have two Sun Fire X2100 M2 servers, but these sound like jet engines, so I'm thinking about getting rid of them even though they are extremely reliable. I'm essentially looking for something along the following lines:

1. Rack mountable silent chassis
2. Quality PSU
2. ECC memory (AMD CPU)
3. SSD for OS

This would essentially be a build that I would use as a file server. I have an Adaptec 5085 card (this is a $500 SAS RAID card) and I'm looking at hooking it up into a disk bay with Seagate Constellation ES.3 disks. I'm trying to build a setup with minimal risk for corruption, but for the cheapest possible cost.

Since RAID stuff would be handled by the Adaptec card, I would require almost nothing out of a CPU in terms of computing power. Would you expect there to be significant differences in terms of reliability between a consumer level AMD and their Opterons? Anything that requires minimal amount of power would be good.

I guess a perfect setup would be a build based on AMDs Opteron lineup from 3-4 years ago, but finding these as new together with a mobo might be tricky. Does anyone know if any of these are still easily available? Even something old enough to require DDR2 RAM would work, since you can get ECC DDR2 sticks for next to nothing.

Anyone have any suggestions?
 
1U and quiet can be a hard combination.

If you are building it, why does it have to be new? You can get rackable 1U with 16GB of RAM for $150-$200. It'll be easier to make that quiet (they really aren't bad to begin with).

If you insist on building "new" with old parts, good luck. You will most likely be paying more than new hardware just for NOS.
 
I am using a supermicro h8smi-2 (Rev2 allows up to quad-core am3 processors) with 8GB un-buffered ECC RAM and an Athlon II X4 620e. Keep in mind that on AMD processors even the memory controller on the desktop lines have ECC support, it's just the motherboard manufacturers rarely use it; the two manufacturers i trust to support it are supermicro and tyan, and supermicro parts are just easier to find. Using the same board with an Athlon II X2 270u (25w TDP) could allow you to really cut airflow requirements, those may be a bit troublesome to find though. I lucked out when I found the 620e used for a good price, you get what you pay for sometimes though, i wound up having to sit for almost an hour with a 0.5 mm mechanical pencil straightening out the cpu pins because it was shipped improperly (got it working though).

Just FYI, i bought one of these: ebay item# 380703889981
It seems to be running well so far; my only word of warning is the northbridge fan is pretty loud, you might want to replace that with a larger fanless or a larger sink with a lower speed fan.
 
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