I was in need of a new main server in my home. My previous machine which I deployed in 2019 out of “yester-years” parts had a dual role, AMD server and gaming machine. Although I didn’t really use it much for gaming, it did act as a great server.
Building an AMD Server and Game Machine out of Yester-Year’s Parts
Unfortunately, about a year ago, the machine was in need of some major upgrades / refurbishment or outright replacing it. I originally intended on building another machine, in a rack mountable case and started pricing the parts out. That was until I was offered a long retired Dell PowerEdge R710. It had no drives but did have 4 caddies for drives, 24 GB of RAM with two Intel Xeon E5620 CPUs. The RAID controller installed was an H700 512MB version. The machine as it was wasn’t ready to be used so I decided to do some upgrades to make it satisfy my current requirements.
A great resource I found for this particular server, about mid way through the project was from Green PC Gamers dot com. It has just about everything you need to know about juicing this old server up.
Hardware
CPU
Originally this machine had an Intel Xeon E5620 but it now has an Intel Xeon X5690. This is obviously not a blazing fast CPU by today’s server standards but for my purposes, this is quite satisfactory. The upgrade is not quite double but it is close enough to double.
As far as performance goes, this is currently meeting my needs. If anything, it is making me think how I can use this machine for more tasks since I have the processing power to do so.
Total cost in CPU upgrade: $56.17
RAM
The goal was to put 288 GB of RAM since that is the limit but I can’t seem to get the system to allow that configuration. So, for the time being, I have 192 GB installed with 188 GB available. I’m not 100% sure what the other 4 GB are doing but I’m sure it is important.
My total cost in the RAM upgrade was $107.82
Storage
Since this machine was without any drives but I did have 4 drive caddies, I ended up ordering 4 more drive caddies so I could load the front of this machine up with 8 drives.
4 caddies on ebay: $22.40
For the drives, I purchased on eBay, 8, 5TB Seagate BarraCuda, 2.5″ 5400RPM SATA drives. The listing said it was “laptop” hard drives but at 15mm height, that is no laptop drive I can recall seeing before. Because of the fact that hard drive manufacturers like to use base 10 instead of base 2 for the storage limit on the drives, these ended up being 4.55TB of storage but not until after I replaced the RAID card (more on that in a bit).
8 5TB, 2.5″ Hard Drives: $932.72
The included RAID controller, the Dell Perc H700 512MB model which was not adequate to be able to address all 5 TB (4.55 TB) of each drive. Only 2 TB could be addressed. The fix for this was to buy the Dell Perc H700 1GB model to address the larger drives. Supposedly there is a firmware upgrade that could have fixed this but I can’t verify that.
I also want to note that I did purchase another RAID card but that was not compatible with the R710. So, if you intend on using drives larger than 2TB in the R710, try updating the firmware, if that doesn’t work by the Perc H700 1GB card.
I set up my 8 drives in RAID 5, providing me 31.8 TB of storage, so just shy of 32TB and I am quite pleased with this. I don’t currently have a drive to pop in the server, should there be a failure so I will have to work on that at some point.
Dell Perc H700 1GB RAID Controller: $25.01
Total expense on upgrading the storage: $980.13
GPU
The current built in graphics are terrible, simply terrible and I would like to put a GPU in this machine. I don’t have a solution quite yet as my attempt to purchase a PCI power cable extension on ebay never shipped and I haven’t yet revisited this, but it is something I would like to yet do.
Total Cost
I spent nothing on the server itself but all the upgrades, not including my RAID card mistake, I invested $1,133.01 into this server project.
Software
Hardware is nothing without the proper software complement. I certainly wasn’t going to put on Windows Server 2008 which is one of the Dell recommendations. I was, of course, going to stick with my tried and true friend, openSUSE Tumbleweed. After all, nearly 5 years of Tumbleweed performing server duty on the last server made it clear that Tumbleweed is a fine server distribution.
Operating System
Since I had 32 TB of storage available to me, I set this server up with a single BTRFS partition, plus the obligatory 512 MB EFI System Partition. In retrospect, I should have purchased a separate PCIe card with NVMe as the boot device, but here I am.
I installed openSUSE Tumbleweed without a Swap partition. I may add a swap file later but for now, I am content with my arrangement. I did installed a desktop environment, KDE Plasma which works just fine. I just happen to be comfortable with that choice and space constraints are not an issue.
Cockpit
Cockpit is a web-based graphical interface for managing server resources and functions. It has positioned itself as a friendly and intuitive interface for managing the server. I have played with Cockpit in the past and I must say it is absolutely fantastic.
I really enjoy the interface for virtual machines. It’s very clean and intuitive. It is very easy to modify disk properties, network interfaces and add any host devices.
It is also very easy to create VM snapshots with just a few clicks.
This is just a slice of what Cockpit does and really deserves a lot more attention. I am using this server as more reason to learn and understand how to do great things with my server.
Syncthing
Syncthing is my go-to file synchronization tool. I greatly appreciate the decentralized nature of this application but I am finding that this may not be the best scalable solution with multiple users on one server but that can be quibbled over at another time.
Tailscale
Since I would like to stay connected to my server with my phone and computer. I have set up Tailscale on this machine. It’s great for staying connected when I am playing the part of a digital nomad especially. It has reduced the stress on keeping my local, mobile, machine a bit more clear of digital clutter..
How I am using this currently:
NFS and FS-Cache | Faster Performance with Distributed Storage
Emby
I do plan to try out some other options here but Emby has worked quite well for me. It is an intuitive interface that I have enjoyed using over the years but I think it is time I do some more exploration.
Emby Media Server on openSUSE Linux | Review
More things to come
I intend on trying out a number of other services that can be run on this machine. Nextcloud comes to mind, Jellyfin is another. Some other things I would like to do is to be able to offload certain processes from my Framework 13 to the server, specific cases and I think I might have some ideas already in mind on this. More on this as I make it happen
Final Thoughts
This was one of the more expensive technology projects I have tackled to improve my digital quality of life. I probably could have done this a lot cheaper if I had reduced the size of the drives and didn’t order as much memory but I am still happy with the final results. I would like to bump up the memory to the max but there is just a bit of a fight on this because of reasons I am not 100% sure.
I do believe that this project has already paid for itself in the professional sense. I did have a situation with my employer where I had to deploy a server with a very tiny budget (relatively speaking) and I did so because of all that I learned building this up. I made my mistakes here and as a consequence was able to stand up something quite formidable for the workplace. So, that, in and of itself has made all the struggles I went through with this, very much worth the price.
There is the concern of the cost of electricity. I can confidently say that this machine is no more power hungry than the previous AMD, AM3 based desktop. Looking at my UPS, my entire main distribution frame which includes my cellular modem, firewall, switch, PowerEdge R710, two access points and the BeagleBone Black powering the lights on my house is drawing around 300W which translates into about 21 minutes of runtime on this UPS. It appears that this server does throttle its power usage down to a moderate sip.
If you happen to come across some old server hardware and have the allowance in your budget to learn on it and make something of it, I highly recommend it. It’s not the most power efficient but if you want server hardware configuration in your future, this is a great way to start learning.
References
https://cockpit-project.org
NFS and FS-Cache | Faster Performance with Distributed Storage
Emby Media Server on openSUSE Linux | Review
Framework 13
Building an AMD Server and Game Machine out of Yester-Year’s Parts
https://www.greenpcgamers.com/dell/dell-poweredge-rack/poweredge-11th-gen-servers/poweredge-r710-hardware-upgrade-guide-greenpcgamers-com/