Dell PowerEdge T320
I recently won an auction for a Dell PowerEdge T320 from eBay. It has an Xeon E5 processor with six cores, 8 GB RAM, 4x500 GB HDDs, and a RAID controller card that supports up to 16 HDDs. It has a lot of potential.
Newegg had a good deal on 64GB of RAM, so I went ahead and got some. It has two 32GB sticks and should arrive around the same time as the server. I’ll add an SSD drive for the Operating System and use the existing drives for data.
FreeBSD could be a good fit for this server. If I put FreeBSD on it, I probably won’t toy around with it much. Boring is good. If I install Debian or Ubuntu, I might run VMs or Containers. The primary role of this server is data storage. The two Dell OptiPlex Micro Computers can run my Virtual Machines. It’s probably been 20 years since I’ve run my own FreeBSD server.
It would be nice to offer an archival service for my family, a place to aggregate family photos, documents, etc. I could store everything locally and securely and then have encrypted backups in the cloud.