Fished this monster out of a dumpster a few years back at work and always knew I’d probably do something with it, heard they make great gaming PCs but it’s so freaking loud I never even entertained that possibility.
it has 16x2.5" sata hdd bays, still has the iLO details and serial number card which I hear is uncommon for 2nd hand servers, hardware raid card because of the extra 8 bays and external scsi card.
my self hosting journy only started a few weeks back with a 2 bay synology nas and pi-hole (technically a few years with jellyfin on my main pc but you know …) so simple suggestions, preferably 100% local because I’m behind a CGNAT without ipv6 and it looks like a lot of work to deal with.
and if anyone knows what software is used on the SD slot and internal usb key, if anything, that would be great :) I’m assuming license keys for software or something equally unimportant because I’ve installed Proxmox to mess around with and it didn’t need them.
The problem with these older units is that we have come so far in terms of performance per watt that the cost of electricity quickly makes them irrelevant.
I used to run a cluster of Dell 710s that I was able to replace with a few M720q very cheaply off eBay and run the same workloads at less than 1/3 the power usage (even better at idle, since that really where these old units don’t do well).
I have seen a few converted into DAS or drawers for a rack, but you’d have to already have a rack for that to be useful or worthwhile.