Plan A Computer Build: Addendum

When the Computer Club met this week, we had a little deviation. So, I thought I'd take the opportunity to talk about it. This week, at our regular meeting time, during which we've been planning a Mini-ITX gaming build, most of the students were tied up with other activities. However, the one student who did show up is currently, my most advanced having built his own machine among other experiences. Therefore, what he wanted to learn about was the "next stage".... dabbling in servers to work with Plex, transcoding, etc. Conveniently, I have such a beast just sitting around in our computer room, a cast-off from a commercial client; a Dell PowerEdge SC440. 

Granted, it's really not much of a server. Machines such as these occupied the low-end of the market back in 2006, which is why it was surplus and had been sitting in a corner of our workroom for the last year and a half! However, it turned out to be perfect for a 16 year-old looking for something to learn on. What is it? Well.... it's from the Core/Core 2 Duo generation built around an LGA-775 and Intel's 3000 chipset. That give's it the ability to run relatively modern operating systems, yet is old enough to have a wealth of cheap hardware available.

If you'll look at the SC440 motherboard, what do we see? For one, it's a full-on server board.... but cut down on features to some degree. No SCSI or SAS controller. One CPU socket. But critically, it does have the ability to take Xeon processors, and ECC RAM. There are also 3 PCIe (x8, x4, x1) and 2 32-bit PCI expansion slots. This gives the machine great latitude to accessing a WIDE variety of cards to do just about anything the owner might want for cheap. It's main weakness?

If you look closely at this image, you'll see that there are just 2 dedicated bays for 3.5" hard disk drives. However, there are 2, 5.25" optical drive bays which can be made use of, plus a 3.5" "floppy" bay, which could be used as well. Although, there are only 4 SATA headers on the MB, it seems unlikely that someone would need more with this box!

I must say though, that for a baby sys-admin looking to learn; I couldn't think of a more ideal machine. Although, it's hard to tell from pictures, this thing is solid steel! He's not going to break it! It can take serious hardware. Software for the most part is free, ranging from the ubiquitous Ubuntu, to FreeNAS to more obscure distros. Upgrade parts are cheap! And best of all..... it's free!