Jump down to —> if you don’t want the backstory.
First, I have always dreamed about have a Supermicro chassis.
So, I built my unraid server 6 years ago and filled up my 72TB worth of drives and maxed out the physical space in my Define R7. My server always had kinks, namely my marvel based card that does not play nice with unraid: parity errors on every reboot.
A couple years ago, one of my parity drives started showing sings of death right about the time I was moving apartments, and my server got forgotten since then. Unplugged, collecting dust. I stuck a 14TB easystore in my desktop, made a new plex server, and made do with 576P encodes.
Last weekend, I plugged my server back in after two dormant years and it booted up no problem! I decided to finally pull the trigger on a Supermicro 36 bay chassis from theserverstore with the idea to migrate my drives and hardware to the new barebones chassis.
I got carried away looking at the server options: “Well, I need an IT-mode flashed HBA anyways, so might as well click that option. A chassis with a motherboard isn’t too much more, so I might as well click that too. 128GB of ram is only another 100 bucks? That’s not too bad! Click. Upgrade the processor to dual Xeon E5-2690 for $78 dollars? No big deal.”
Now I am left with a server that is ridiculously overpowered for my needs.
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Old server hardware:
X11SSL-F Xeon E3-1200 8GB ram
New hardware:
X10DRi-T4+ 2x Xeon E5-2690 128GB ram
I will be perfectly happy if my server does nothing else other than run Plex and run a torrent client. I have played with other dockers and downloaders just for fun but have never run any VMs. I share my server with family only and have never had more than 3 concurrent streams serving 1080p encodes.
Now I find myself having a stupidly power hungry server that I simply don’t need.
What would you do? I am thinking about playing around with the new hardware and seeing if I have fun playing around with what is has to offer, but practically speaking, all I want is a plex server with a couple downloaders and forget about it. Sell the over-the-top hardware and get a new motherboard and processor that has a lower TDP? Grab a consumer motherboard, 32 or so GB of ram and some sort of i7?
Instead of selling it like other people suggested, leave it unplugged and wait a few years.
SSDs will continue to get cheaper and eventually reach price parity with hard drives. So you could load it with SSDs and it would be even faster and more powerful but draw less power.