A free old HP rack server raises the power-cost question
An HP ProLiant DL360p Gen8 server that was headed for disposal is being considered as a home server. It turns on and appears to work. The hardware includes 288 GB of DDR3 ECC memory, two Xeon E5-2620 processors, two hot-swappable power supplies, several small 2.5-inch drives under 500 GB, and two expansion cards with four 1-gigabit s each.
The current home server is an HP Z420 v2 workstation with a Xeon E5-1607, 64 GB of memory, Ubuntu Server, an SSD for the , and five 4 TB hard drives in a RAID6 storage setup using mdadm. It runs KVM and separates services into . The services include two s, a Hytale server, a few small game servers such as Terraria, Jellyfin, Radarr, Sonarr, Navidrome, qBittorrent, Nextcloud, WireGuard, Pi-hole, a , Grafana, Uptime Kuma, Wazuh, Flame, Portainer, SearXNG, SMB, and an automatic DVD-ripping script.
The setup was mostly installed and configured manually through terminals, with a possible move to Proxmox later.
Key points
- The HP ProLiant DL360p Gen8 was obtained from e-waste and still boots.
- It has 288 GB of ECC memory, two Xeon processors, and redundant power supplies.
- The existing home server already runs many game, media, file, network, and monitoring services.
- The current setup uses Ubuntu Server, KVM, , and RAID6 storage.
- No actual power-use number is given, so electricity cost remains unknown.