Intel SC5300 Server Chassis - $95

[reefcrazed]

I ordered one of these from Amazon a month ago and have it completely setup, I have really enjoyed the unit and would recommend it to anyone. You get the case, 600w power supply, motherboard, etc.

I picked mine up and ordered two Xeons from Ebay, added some ECC DDR2 and a Dell Perc5i raid controller. I also ordered the add on 6 drive hot swap cage new on Ebay for $75 and after Microsoft Live cashback it was had for around $55 shipped.

I do not have a lot of money in this server but it is running ESXi as I speak and not flinching with quite a few VM's running. The fans are huge but I quieted them down with some Zalman controllers.

http://www.amazon.com/Intel-SE...&qid=1225506471&sr=8-1

Also here is a link to a picture so you can get an idea of the size of the unit, this was after mine was assembled.

SC5300 server

Motherboard specifications

Chassis Information

 

[uhohs]

oh wow, that's bigger than a xbox.

 

[IlllI]

Originally posted by: uhohs
oh wow, that's bigger than a xbox.

a lot of things are

 

[garett]

Are you running a Windows Server OS? I wanted to put together a similar setup, but the $400-$500 cost of the operating system is preventing me from going forward.

Thanks

 

[Goosemaster]

Originally posted by: garett
Are you running a Windows Server OS? I wanted to put together a similar setup, but the $400-$500 cost of the operating system is preventing me from going forward.

Thanks

It really depends on what you want to do.

Solaris is free, Xen (centos, and a number of other distros) is many times free depending on what you require, and VMware's vmware server 1.0x is bulletproof (don't trust 2.0 yet whatever you here) and runs on top of XP.

The fact is that these days most of the heavy lifting for a single host can be done for free using OSS. It's the specifics and scaling that will cost you (in $$$, time or both)

 

[Blazer]

servers isnt something i know alot about, requiring zeon proc's and EEC ram will drive up the price, i am thinking along the lines of a server with WHS as an OS, looks like a great deal for someone with a lic for window server 2008/2003, or a linux based os.

 

[syadnom]

I must say that this price would have been great a while ago but I dont think it is today. The issue here is that this takes 2 socket 604 xeons. You can get dual-core socket 604 units but they are P4 Xeons. You can do much much better than this for much less money with a Quad core, single socket modern xeon with better performance per clock and less heat.

The inexpesive case,mobo,power supply doesnt help because a xeon socket 604 is either going to be cheap and slow, or expensive for something that is modernately fast.

I know that this is a pretty high quality unit but the people that are likely to look at this deal would be much better off getting an antec case with a gigabyte motherboard and grabbing a Core2 Quad or similar Xeon Quad core.

For serving stuff up, you have a few options. For virtualiztion you can just get a copy of ESXi for free, or XenServer single server for free. For operating system, you will be able to do a linux or freebsd or even solaris for free.

Check out some stuff like openfiler or sme server or solaris10/opensolaris

I like solaris for serving up disk space via nfs and iscsi. it also does a great job of cif/smb windows file sharing but I prefer openfiler for serving files to users. openfiler can also hand out nfs and iscsi but *solaris has zfs and it is much faster at that.

debian or ubuntu is a really great platform for LAMP.