My new NAS project got derailed when my wife's home workstation died on a Saturday night when she was on a deadline, and I wound up using my new NAS parts to get her running again. She liked the results so much, she decided to keep it, leaving me with a bunch of new WD Reds and nothing to put them in.
As a replacement, my wife suggested I look through some hardware at her work leftover from a recent refresh, My NAS doesn't do a lot of heavy lifting, so most of what I found was overkill. On the other hand, free is a great price.
So, I thought I'd list my options and see if anyone had any recommendations, or knew if any of these worked particularly well with OMV. Form factor isn't an issue for me, but noise and power consumption are. I'm not very knowledgeable on server hardware, so any advice on how noisy these are would be particularly appreciated.
-- Dell PowerEdge R630 1U: This was the newest item (Haswell E5-2667 v3), but also looked like it would consume the most power? Also, its configured for 2.5" drives which I don't have. If there's a compelling reason to go with it though, I suppose I could dig some up.
-- Dell PowerEdge R320 1U and a Supermicro 1U with X9DBL-IF: Both of these have ivy Bridge E5-2407 (the Supermicro has 2, although I'd probably remove one). These will take the 3.5" drives I have on hand. I assume that if I couldn't get the fan noise down on the Supermicro, it should be easy to transplant in spare tower case I have. I assume the Dells are too proprietary to try that.
-- Dell Optiplex 3020: There were several of these desktops that appear, from the SMART data at least, to have been turned off most of the time. Haswell i5s. They are typical Dell proprietary, but its "Desktop Proprietary" that I am comfortable with. But, it doesn't seem like it would be as much "fun" as having a real server to tinker with.
-- There's also a few Synology RackStation 815+. They look interesting, but I don't know anything about Synology, and I'd like to stick with OMV. Unless someone knows if I can load OMV onto them? They are Atom based units with a USB DOM installed, which I assume serves as the system disk?
Any recommendations or advice sincerely appreciated!