I got this server recently and was able to save it from the e-waste pile and I want to see what I'm able to do with it today. Taking an initial look at this system, it's a super micro system with an AMD Opteron processor inside, which likely means it's a little bit older. And taking a look at the inside of this system, these IDE tables confirm my theory that it's likely an older system. The front of the system also has a few hard drive bays which are filled with 3TB Seagate drives. If those drives are working, this could be a pretty good find containing 12TB worth of hard drives inside. There's also a Noctua Cooler inside, which I believe never came stock in a supermicro system, so it was likely added by someone else later on. But before I look at anything more on the inside of this system, I want to clean all this dust out of here. And with a little bit of dusting, this system looks a lot better now. Looking at the motherboard, I can't quite find the model number of it yet, but looking at the socket layout, it looks like an AMD C32 socket, which is a bit over 10 years old now, and had CPUs that were similar to the Phenom 2, Bulldoz er, and Piledriver based CPUs on the desktop. It also has 3 16GB DDR3 registered DIMMs, which seems a little bit odd because it is a dual channel CPU, so it's weird they want to either put 2 or 4 sticks in for better performance. It has 4 3TB hard drives for data, and another hard drive tucked in here that I can't find an easy way to access, so I'm not sure what the drive is. At this point, I just want to fire it up, see if it turns on, see if there's any information or OS that it boots into, and I'll see where it goes from there. So now it's time to plug in the system and see what I get. Plugging it in, it looks like it immediately starts running the system in fans for a second or two, and then fires it up. And unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be powering up. I've turned it on and let it sit on for about a minute with the VGA cable plugged into my monitor, I'm getting no signal out of it, and I'm pretty sure I have my monitor plugged in correctly. I got the system on my test bench now, and I'm going to start ripping out parts on the system so I can find out which parts work and which parts don't. And now I got all of these parts out of the system. Some of the interesting things I noticed was Super Micro uses an almost ATX mounting system, but not quite. So it doesn't use the back mounts, it uses internal ones. There was two more hard drives hidden in here, both of which are 3TB WD green drives. One was plugged in, one wasn't. One was in this little 5.25" adapter, and one was just kind of shoved into a 3.5" front bay adapter. On the motherboard, there was two Noctua fans exhausting air out, which normally is not how you want to do it because you want the air to go one direction, which seems wrong. one direction, which seems wrong. And other than that, it looks like just an old dusty system, so I'm going to just start testing things like the motherboard, the drives, and everything else individually to try to find out what parts work and can be reused and which parts are going to go in the e-race then. I got a little motherboard test bench setup right here. I have the integrated power supply powering the motherboard with the cooler and two sticks of RAM, and hopefully this motherboard will just fire up. And with a little bit of playing with memory configuration, I was able to get this board to post, and now I can see and enter the BIOS on this system. Inside this system, I have an AMD Opteron 4334, which is similar to an AMD FX6300 on the desktop. The board this system came with was an H8DCL-6/IF. It seems like a relatively decent board. It is missing some of the features like the separate SAS controller, but it still has four X8 slots and an X16 slot. It has the dual socket capability if I wanted to add that later on. I also took a look at the hard drives to see what their reported health was. All of the Seagate drives had roughly 37,000 hours on it with no reported errors, and the WD green drives had roughly 20,000 hours on it with no reported errors. Although the WD green drives had quite a few load and unload cycles, which can potentially cause issues and these green drives aren't known for being the most reliable. And overall, this seems like a pretty decent platform. While it is 10 years old and missing out on a lot of features, it still has a good amount of expansion room on the motherboard. Power consumption isn't that bad. 48 gigs of RAM on the older 6-core processor is still decent for a lot of use cases, and the 6 SATA ports and 6 3TB hard drives gives me quite a bit of storage space I can use. So my thought is put true NAS on this system, make a little NAS out of it, and see how well this system works as a NAS. So I finished cleaning up this system, and now the case, motherboard, power supply, and other components are much cleaner than how I got them. And I plan to put this system back together to be used as a true NAS system, but I'm going to make a few changes before I put it back together. The big addition is this 80GB SSD that I'm going to be using as a boot drive for TrueNAS I'm also going to be removing a few components that I don't need. For example, the back fan is almost useless in this system because it doesn't have a side panel. I'm going to remove the DVD drive because it's useless these days. And then I'm going to use the 4 C-Gate drives in a RAID Z or RAID 5 as the main storage array. And that leaves me with one open SATA port if I wanted to do something like a cache drive or a mirrored boot drive. This setup would give me two extra 3TB drives that I could use as cold spares in case one of the 3TB drives in the array fails. And let's take a look at this system once I finish constructing it. And now I finished building this system, and it looks a lot better on the inside than when I got it. And now it's time to install the operating system. So I'm going to be installing true NAS scale on this system. Looking at the differences between core and scale, they are pretty similar features wise. And scale runs off Linux which generally has better hardware support, so why not run scale as from everything I can see? Let me know if you have any other thoughts on core versus scale in the comments below. The installation is pretty simple for true NAS. Tell it which drive you want to install on. Confirm you want to install it on that drive. Select the web UI installation method and give it a password to log into the webpage with. And then it will start copying data from your install image to the SSD. And that's it. In a little bit, it will be able to boot into the web interface and use the true NAS system. True NAS has finished installing on this system. And now I can look at the screen and see the IP address of the system. And then I can go into the browser on my computer, type that IP address in, and I see the true NAS scale login page. And I can type in the admin username and the password I put in when setting up this system. I can see the dashboard of the system and I can verify that it's detecting all of my hardware correctly. It sees my 6 core CPU. AMD's temperature sensors were weird, at least on Linux and these older generations. It sees all of my memory. And I have no storage set up on it currently. So I'm going to go create a pool, use all of my drives. And then I'm going to put them in here and I'm going to use it to set up a RAID Z1 which makes the most sense for four drives to me. And I'm going to give it a name of Dusty. So I'm going to click create and I want to create one SMB share on this system with a user that can only access it using their password. And now that my pool is created, this 7.8 tebibytes of space seems correct. And I'm going to go under data sets and I'm going to create a data set, which is like a folder, but it has a lot of other ZFS options. I'm going to call it share one in this case. And since it's a ZFS data set, instead of just a folder, I can set things like sync, compression level, atime and other settings on it come specific to that data set. Now I'm going to go under credentials and then local users and create a user one that's going to be able to access this system. And then I'm going to put in a password for them to access the system with. And I'm going to leave everything else default for this user. Going to click save. And then once I created this user, I'm going to go make a share that they can access. So I have the share here. I'm going to click add. I'm going to give them the location that it's mounted at. So share one, default share parameters and hit save. And then now that the share is set up, I'm going to set up the data set permission so that my user has access to it. So I'm going to set the owner to user one and then I'm going to apply owner and give them full access to this system for read and write, save access control list. It's going to save that to the system. And now that the share has been created, I should be able to open windows explorer. I then go into computer map network drive, type in the IP address or name of the system. In this case, one into one six eight dot one dot two one six slash share one hit enter. It's going to ask for my username here and I'm going to put in my password. And now that I've logged in, I see I have an empty share in the system looking at the space in windows as that seven point seven eight tebibytes bytes of space. And as a quick speed test, I'm going to copy some video files to the NAS over the network and taking a look at the speed test. It looks like it's hitting the limits of gigabit networking. So this system is working about as fast as it could. And now I have a NAS from parts that I got for free and a spare SSD that I put into it. And with a little bit of cleaning, tweaking and OS installs, it's made into a quite good NAS that's able to fill gigabit speeds and I can install apps or other programs on it if I see fit. That's still our compromises and I would not have chosen this hardware if I was buying it, but it's not bad, especially for being free. One other common critique of older NAS systems is the amount of power consumption that they use. And this NAS is currently using about 80 watts idle and about 100 watts when copying files to and from it, which is a good amount more than a new low power platform would use. But I will mention 40 of those watts are these hard drives that are spinning and the base platform alone only uses about 40 watts. So getting even a super low power platform that idles at 10 watts would only net you down to about 50 watts at idle, which while being a significant improvement, isn't that big. And yes, you would save money with lower power consumption, but it likely wouldn't pay for new hardware in a situation like this. Thanks for watching this video and hopefully this gave you a few ideas of what you can do with an old system like this. Let me know if you come across old systems like this and what you like to do with them.
