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.

Are you using the same machine for your media storage?

I would say Unraid. For the home user it’s easily the most flexible, has a great hypervisor for VM’s as well as an excellent container manager, an absurd amount of ‘one click install’ community apps, while being GUI based and easy to use and offering features like array expansion on a single disk.

Unraid.

There is no better home server OS imo.

For what you’re doing, I would suggest that you’re running a home server, not a home lab.

And with your workload, I would take a i3 12100 or a 13500 well before I stepped back in time to now almost decade old processors.

Empirical data; I went from dual 2660v4’s to a 12600k (now a 13500) and have better performance in every single metric, while also having the best transcoder for Plex (UHD 770), while saving $30/mo on my electric bill (200kwh/mo for the 2660v4’s, 80kwh/mo for the 13500 which is doing more with more disks than the 2660v4’s ever did).

Meh. You paid someone to get rid of their ewaste.

With top end processors you’re still left with garbage CPU performance, especially single thread performance. 24c/48t of crap 🤷‍♂️ I’m not sure why guys in this group get so excited over cores and threads. Omgmoar! 🙄

For what you’ll pay in electric you could have had a brand new machine on a desktop processor that would decimate that machine on 1/4 of the power. (I went from 2660v4’s to a 13500, cut my power by now than half and have significantly better performance in every way. Paid for itself in 18 months)

“Linux is best” is uttered by those living in their mother’s basement having arm chair arguments online, while fapping to pictures of the girl they had a crush on in 9th grade.

Linux (especially vanilla distros like Ubuntu, Arch, Fedora, etc) in the home lab is for those that hate themselves and like making everything as difficult as possible.

Now that said, while Windows has gotten absurdly better over the years as far as stability goes, it’s still not my personal cup of tea for a home server.

For me, Unraid, hands down and not a second guess. While it is Linux based, you need to know exactly nothing about Linux to run it. Which is the best part, never needing to never learn anything about archaic commands of things that you will never need to know in your day to day life.

TrueNAS deserves an honorable mention, but it’s best left out of the home server space for a large variety of reasons. Excellent for business where you have business budgets.

Sandy/Ivy machines aren’t worth plugging in to an outlet. Unless your power is free and even then it’s questionable. I junk v4 Xeon’s at this point.

I’ve been using Thermaltake GX2’s. They’re $50 and still maintain a Gold rating. For the marginal difference on an electric bill going from gold to platinum, it would take me 10 years to make up the difference in cost of the PSU.

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.

Are you intending on running this as a 24/7 machine?

Keep in mind, these are power hungry processors that don’t idle down particularly well that have overall performance of a potato.

You had mentioned euro in your post which tells me that you likely pay quite a lot for your electric. These machines are dumpster fodder except for occasional use as a learning machine, definitely not worth running 24/7. Especially when a Intel box from the last 5 years will out perform it on significantly less power.

If the OP is going to use it as a NAS, OP should get rid of it. Westmere is worthless for a 24/7 server. You’ll pay more for power in a year of running it than what a new machine with better performance would cost.

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.