Help with PC Build - scavenged parts

[Jophiel]

@iamthewalrus_3

Looking around online, the CPU socket on that board is LGA 1156. If I buy another board that supports that socket, could I use the CPU and memory from the Dell board? What other compatibility do I need to check?

Be certain that the board accepts that specific style of CPU; just being an 1156 socket may not be enough. Some won’t accept i7 processors, for instance. I once bought a board that said on the website it accepted my i3, but it only did so after flashing a new BIOS. Took a full night of research to understand why it was crashing immediately on boot.

As mentioned, the 1156 set is obsolete and has been for a while so you’ll almost certainly need to buy a used or refurbished board unless you want to pay an exorbitant amount for a new board in which case you’d be better off buying new technology. Reusing parts only makes sense when you’re saving money in the process.

[iamthewalrus_3]

@Terry_Kennedy

One of the posts in Great Deals over at StH is a 1RU rackmount server where the seller has hundreds of them and is willing to sell for $85 in qty 1. Just add CPU, memory, and drives. As an example.

And a rack. A little tower can go behind the desk. I don’t have an obvious place to put a rack. Or is there a way to mount a rackmounted server that doesn’t take up ~6 times as much floor space as a little tower?

Take a look at my RAIDzilla 2.5 systems. Home-designed and built from various off-the-shelf components. Lots of discussions about backup strategy, and cool pictures (if I do say so myself).

Thanks!

RAID is not backup. Neither is a copy of the data in the same building (even on another floor). RAID will save you from some hardware failures (but not all). It doesn’t do anything for you if you delete the wrong files / directory by accident, or any one of a number of other events that are more likely than you might think.

The physical DVDs are the backup, and they are actually stored in a different building (detached garage). And if the whole house and garage is swallowed up into the earth, insurance money rebuying the ones we actually want to watch is the backup). As it is, I’m probably only going to rerip only some of them.

I have an online backup service that I use for important data like photographs. And I’ve actually tested restoring from it.

Alternately, maybe I don’t want RAID at all. Maybe I just want pairs of drives backing up to each other. That solves both the hard drive failure and the dumbass user deleting things failure cases. And I already have backup software on my windows box… Hrm.

@Jophiel

Be certain that the board accepts that specific style of CPU; just being an 1156 socket may not be enough. Some won’t accept i7 processors, for instance. I once bought a board that said on the website it accepted my i3, but it only did so after flashing a new BIOS. Took a full night of research to understand why it was crashing immediately on boot.

Good to know.

@Quartz

Don’t bother with anything other than RAID 1 or RAID 10. Rebuild times on large HDDs in RAID 5 or 6 can be considerable. Just get yourself a pair of high-capacity HDDs and mirror them.

I don’t think I care about rebuild time, if it’s just time the server is sitting there churning away at disks. If the server is down for a week to rebuild, the alternative is watch Netflix, which isn’t really a great hardship. If thewalrus has to spend hours putting DVDs in and out of drives, that is a hardship.

[Quartz]

@iamthewalrus_3

And a rack.

No, you don’t need a rack. Just stick the thing on its side somewhere.

[iamthewalrus_3]

Bumping for info on what I actually ended up doing, in case someone finds this and wonders. I was able to scavenge basically a whole Dell system and spend $40 on a case and $30 on a SATA card (I already had a power supply from a previous build) and get a pretty decent server for myself.

I used a Dell 9010 desktop model, and was able to put it into another case without much trouble. People said that Dell uses custom everything, but that’s not true, at least for this model.

The list of things that just worked fine:

The mobo has normal mounting points (I think not full ATX, but maybe mini-ATX).
The power supply is normal 24-pin + 4-pin ATX.
The front two USB ports have a normal pinout.
The port mask on the back fits right into a standard ATX case.
The CPU has a dedicated fan on it.
A cheap PCIe x1 4-port SATA card gave me plenty of hard drive capacity.

There were some issues, but not showstoppers:

The Dell has 4 things that plug into places on the board that use non-standard pinouts: front panel (2 more USB ports + headphones/microphone), power switch w/ LED, case fan, temperature sensor. If any of these is missing, it won’t boot without you hitting F1 after POST.

In my case, since this is a server that should always be on, and I have a much bigger case with plenty of room, I just shoved them all inside the case and set the BIOS to turn on when power is restored, so I can use the power switch on the power supply if I need to turn it off. I don’t care about the missing features like headphones/microphone. At some point, I expect I’ll splice into the Dell power button cable and replace the fan with a resistor (since the case already has several large fans that provide plenty of cooling), but for now it’s functioning.

And I gave up on RAID, since I don’t really need it in this case. I just bought one ginormous Archive HDD and have backups running to it. So I’m good if any one drive dies. And I’m good for at least a little while if I accidentally delete something.