NAS.

Over the last 24 months I’ve built 300TB (a mix of 10 and 14TB disks) for $2500 in disks. I could do that right now for $2100. A 18TB LTO9 tape is more expensive than what I’m paying per TB for 14TB disks.

$700 in hardware to build the NAS with 25 bays.

Glacier would cost you $1080/mo in storage fees alone (300,000GB @ $0.0036) not including the $0.09/GB to get any data back out. Deep Glacier is less (by half, for storage), but comes with strings attached.

Don’t forget to factor in labor hours of what it’s going to cost you to maintain a tape library or a local server in general.

Are you charging clients for long term storage after a project is complete? If not, you should be.

I would sell it. Everything I do is in containers, I have no need for 32/64, nor do I have the need for it to increase my electric bill.

DL360 ≠ DL380

But you’ve done a nice job of proving my point. You have a system that you have to hack together your drive storage, since it can’t accommodate 3.5" drives. You have have a system that has abysmal single thread performance. You have a system that has overall less compute power than a $240 midrange desktop CPU, yes uses over twice the power. You have a system that has no hardware media encoding.

I’ll add, I certainly don’t trust ILO to report accurate power draw. Measure from the wall. Each of your CPU’s pulls over 120w by themselves alone at 100% utilization. So either your weren’t pushing them, or your numbers are off. You should have been pulling 300w at a minimum.

A pair of 2680v4’s certainly didn’t decrease your power usage unless you came from Nehalem’s.

My 2660v4’s in a DL380P G9 idled at 220w. Getting rid of that machine and moving to Alder Lake was the absolute best thing I did for my home server. The new system runs circles around those ancient Xeon’s and consumes less than half of the power. I went from averaging 200kwh/mo with the HPE to ~80kwh/mo. $30/mo savings paid for the entire upgrade to a better platform.

I agree that using old R730’s for Plex or a home server is silly. Getting rid of my HPE DL380 G9 (the HPE equivalent of a Dell R730) was the best thing I ever did.

For low end budget? i3 12100, Gigabyte Gaming X Z690 DDR4 or Aorus Elite DDR4 motherboard, Unraid, 2x8gb DDR4 3600 (I’ve been using Corsaor LPX for the last dozen+ Unraid builds I’ve done). Fractal R5 case with a Thermaltake GX2 PSU.

That should land you just a smidge above $500, not inclusive of the Unraid license.

i5 13500 is an excellent upgrade if you are anticipating running compute heavy tasks. Definitely pick up a pair of 1TB NVME to run as wrote cache and storage for your containers (Plex and whatnot).

Sell the R730’s. A single 13500 will likely be more powerful than both of them combined, not that you need the power in the first place. If you get lucky you can find some dolt that will pay a premium for them because they think Xeon’s are so powerful and cool!

Profit. Literally. You’ll make your money back in not paying to power a R730 (or worse, two of them).

Hard no.

That machine will cost you more in power than what you could have built a modern server for that will decimate that Dell relic in performance.

For $500 you can build a brand new, complete machine based around a i3 12100.

For comparison, a cheap 12100 has three times the compute power of that Xeon dinosaur, plus hardware transcoding. The 12100 will do 6+ 4K transcodes, that Xeon will do zero.

Yes, $50 up front is cheap. It will cost you far more in the long run while having garbage performance.

You’ve not actually started what your uses are for the machine.

Which vehicle is better, a Duramax 3500 or a Chevy Bolt?

Both excellent vehicles with hugely different use cases.