We still have a bunch of these in service mostly as backup servers running Truenas. Most of these are sitting in server rooms so we generally didn't mess with the fans but Noctua or Arctic fans work as replacements and there are scripts floating around out there to control the fans.
I’m Japanese and I got this for $50 (¥8000) and it’s amazing for the price. Manually setting fan speed with ipmitool brought it near silent with 8 bays all populated.
you can set the fan speed in the idrac normally 30% is minimum, but you can get low as 300rpm and if this is still too fast you can set the gain and an offset if you want 0 rpm. normaly you set your minimum % fan speed and then your temperature value for 100% fan speed. the rest does the controller by its self. I have a R630 and its annoyingly loud too but i used only the minimum % fan speed and kept the 85°C for 100%. The PowerEdge controls the fans by inlet and outlet Temperature, not by CPU load or CPU temperature. you have over 15 temperature sensors on your Mainboard, your Drive Backplane, front IO borad and in your PSUs. i don't know exactly how the PID for the fans is setup but even the temperatures of your Drives and PCIe Devises is included, that is why Dell wants you to buy only compatible hardware from their tested list. But this doesn't mean none compatible hardware doesn't work. For PCIE devises and drives there are standards, and normally they work without issues unless there is a weird hardware or firmware bug.
@@reinekewf7987 R630s like Noctuas, BTW. :) And you can add extra intake/extake to it with an additional fan controller and make it very quiet, over-all. Not T320/420 quiet, but still. :)
Regarding the IOMMU Errors: Your PCI Devices are sorted in IOMMU Groups. When passing through a PCI Device you MUST pass through all Devices in this Group. It’s also important to disregard any type of PCI Bridges when passing through. You can avoid this by using Linux Kernels like Linux Zen that use ACS Patching and thereby „alter“ the IOMMU Groups. After doing that, you can pass through anything you wan‘t given it has its own group
as somebody who has running multiple servers in my homelab. The PowerEdge-Towers or HP MLs are pretty good if you have the space where you can put them (not only cause of their size, also because of the noise). the Gen8 was the peak of the HP Microservers. If you had one and upgraded to the max you are probably still working with these guys. there was also a matching switch from HP for those servers. we used them in branch offices as Fileserver, secondary DC. personally in my home lab I tend to the Minisforum MS-01 (got 3 now for a cluster) and a DS1621+ from Synology where also 2X10Gbit is installed. this is a pretty good setup for home envoirement without paying to much for electricity or having cooling issues
As someone who has worked on dell poweredge professionally for the last 8 years. I was kind of happy to see a dell get some home lab love. Was also surprised how much power that T server pulled. I have an r720xd and at idle mine pulled around 130w. I do understand the difference, but still cool to see the differences in the T lineup. I know there were some variations of the T model with 16 drive bays in the front. You can get idrac licensing for dirt cheap for the older models pretty easily. Don't let that steer anyone away from getting one of these.
@@frankniethardt1813 Mehhhh you can get a T320/420 down pretty low in Watts using SSD, Noctua fans, and well-directed air-flow with the fantastic E5-2450L v2 processors. The RAM takes some power too, I know but you can use larger capacity DIMMs so it helps. :)
Would love to see you upgrade this unit. Of course if you make videos explaining what upgrades work and how to install them the prices on eBay will go way up. How about a “make it an all around server/nas” video?
The child of this and a Dell 5820 would be my budget homelab dream. The only things missing on the 5820 are a couple extra drive bays (it has 4. I'd love 6, and 8 would obviously be even better), enterprise-level management, and transcoding but that's a harder limitation obviously. It can use Intel i-series CPUs, but the obvious choice is a Xeon for massive PCIe and ECC memory
At 2:57 "....before taking something apart I always like to make sure it's working...." That used to not be the case! When I first started watching your channel you used to take things apart before you check to see if they worked. You even mentioned that something didn't work when you put it back together and you had no idea if it worked before that so you don't know if you did something or if it was broke when you got it. I used to like watching your videos because you were very into cleaning the computer, and for some reason I enjoyed watching that. You have migrated to other types of videos but I still like them....this video appears to give you a chance to go back to your roots!!
I have a T330 as a home server myself. Great machine. You can even have wheels for it. I replaced the fan with a Corsair ML120, had to set a minimum PWM to maintain a minimal air flow, but it keeps the system cool enough and quite... I hadn't have a need for Intel QuickSync, yet...
Great video as usual! I bought a Lenovo TS460 for about $100 on Craigslist last year. It’s my first home server - I was inspired by your videos to try my hand converting a used system into a home nas. I went with Unraid OS, and kept the optical drive for ripping DVDs (inspired by a similar build you did in a previous video). The Dell in this video seems like similar system to mine (albeit without the proprietary Lenovo stuff). Cool to see you also using a “small business server” - thanks for the top quality content!
Wolfgang has a video on his channel called "Don't Make This Mistake Building a Home Server!" He talks there abbout IPMI and integrated GPU. He made essentialy same misstake :)
I got the bigger T430, swapped out the cpu and rear coolers for Noctua ones, almost no noise. Not booting from the NVME is annoying, but you can install Clover on those internal SD cards. Keep an eye out on the Ebay descriptions, mine came with an enterprise license for iDrac, super useful - all the bios / other updates can be done from there. Loving the server, with 4 HDDs, 2x E5-2660 V4, 256gb ram, and a 2070RTX, the power draw was just under 100W. Running proxmox of course :)
I have a T630 (big brother to the T330) and I love it! I also got a T320 with it but my friend is borrowing it right now, but both systems are perfect for pretty much anything you can throw at them!
At that price, it might just be a good chassis for a NAS that uses off the shelf components. Last I looked, a chassis with front bays alone was $300+, if you snag a T330 (or older) and already have a NAS system looking for a new home, you might just have struck gold. The standoff layout seems to match ATX, and at 4U you have plenty a cooler that fits in there.
I also have a t330 that I bought last year, and I was able to get it to boot from an m.2 nvme ssd by using a workaround. I flashed a separate boot manager on a super cheap tiny flash drive that I leave plugged in to the front of the server, and then direct the boot manager to boot from the pcie slot. I think the boot manager also needed the pcie drivers for the server. If you want to try this, let me know, and I will check which boot manager it is.
Loved the editing on this one, was the perfect mix of fun and information delivery! These are pretty nice machines, at the right price. I considered getting a couple of these, but decided to pick up a couple Define R5s. Not sure what hardware I'm putting in them yet, but I do have an X99 board laying around, along with an X299 board, not sure if that one works though. Same issue with drives, no idea what to put in these. I'll figure that one out eventually though.
Great video! I have one and I think it's amazing. I have it setup as a cold-storage zfs-backup and for that purpose it works great. I would LOVE if it had 12 3.5" bays but I can only dream. I live in a quite small apartment, but I would love to have this machine in a semi-remote location like a cellar or something like that. Cold-storage is surely a great boost to data security.
Got a T420 that’s been everywhere between bare metal Ubuntu Server/Windows Server, to Proxmox/Esxi. Primary uses have been file sharing for the 10Gbase-T home lan, game server hosting, test grounds for software and scripts, and even at one point I had the PfSense gateway virtualized running through it on top of everything else. Whether I throw just a couple of things at it or everything and anything, I know I can count on that old chunky metal bastard.
I have a T320 as my home server, they were dirt cheap for a while (~$100 equivalent) so i picked up a couple (the other is for spare parts). I ran in to the same problem with bifurcation preventing multiple NVME SSDs in the same PCI-e, but as i too have the dual SD-card thing i installed with /boot on it and the rest on an NVME. Other than that the CPU is E5-2420v2 and i managed to scrounge up 88 GB of RAM for it, i have 3x16 TB in RAIDZ1 for mass storage, a pair of older 8TB for backups (i swap those with another pair at regular intervals to have an offline offsite backup as well. I run Ubuntu as the base OS and pfSense in a VM is my main router/firewall (one of the ports on the back is dedicated to the VM for WAN, the other i LAN and is bridged with the host system, most other things i run in docker containers.
I was given a new, old stock T320. I've had a blast beefing it up. It was the base desktop model without redundant power supplies, and no front drive bays. I've added a HBA, and filled the four internal bays, added 48GB of ram, and threw in a E5-2470 CPU. I ran into the same issue as you did when I put in an NVMe drive with a PCIe adater. I was able to boot to it using a very specific version of Clover UEFI, which is installed on a flash drive inserted into the internal USB port. You might be able to use the internal SD slot for the same. So far, it's been a pretty solid unit! It's been choochin' along with Jellyfin on Proxmox with a P400 for transcoding.
I have a T320 with E5-2470V2 and 48GB RAM lovely machine, near silent I might upgrade it to 96GB using 8x 16GB DIMMs I didn't do anything fancy with booting, just stuffed an SSD into it, hooked upto one of the two onboard SATA connectors, and boot proxmox off it, all my VMs are hosted on the 8x 3TB drives I have
agree, could be good for specific use case given the "cheap" used price compared to a new one. BTW, you could also use a brush to clean PC's along side with the vacuum cleaner for completely dry cleaning.
I used a T430 for over 6 years as my main file server, and it was pretty great if you're ok with the limitations. dual socket E5, gives more power and options for desired config, and the 3 optical bays were perfect for putting a 5x3.5" cage. I got mine for free from my job at the time, so it was worth dropping some money on CPU, RAM and HDD upgrades. iDRAC licenses can be had on ebay for pretty cheap, but it is a pain for sure. adjusting the fan speed with some commands helps a lot, but it still sucks to only have the one fan for the whole system. I rigged up a couple extras for my drive cage and PCIE cards with a sata adapter.
9 часов назад
i would suggest adding fan to RAID card (whatever it is called) as cooler gets blazingly hot, and also checking battery on its other side (it likes to expand over time).
I ran a very similar dell T430 for my homelab. Proxmox with passthrough for HBA to a Truenas VM(dont remember how I got that to work) makes a great all-in-one homelab machine.
About the iGPU - if you want to use it, you really need a board that has some video output connectors from the CPU (dp/hdmi/dvi) and not just the iLO's VGA. I found the same issue with the Supermicro X10SLE-F boards (its a previous - 4th generation Haswell platform) and the documentation explicitly says that if you install a gpu enabled cpu (with 5 instead of 0 as the last/fourth digit), then that iGPU will be not used. If I recall correctly, they blamed the limitation to the low/entry level chipset model - but that is just a stupid excuse, as are all chipset related limitations, even that the thing is a CPU part (like the PEG and IMC)
that's is right but the igpu isn't disabled it has no output you have to set a software frame buffer path. then you are able to use the iGPU for transcoding but you are limmited to RAM speed or Drive Speed depending on your path. RAM does give you better frame times but reduces the overall system performance significantly. The matrox g200 that the t630 uses is inside the Aspeed IPMI controller, where the idrac lives and is primarly used for video encoding. Matrox only does video transcoder not GPUs. i have worked in the past in a server farm, and they had r830 and r840 stacked full of matrox M264 S4 encoder cards, each of them capable of up to 400 parallel streams.
I used to have a Poweredge R720 as my home server, but I switched to HPE ML110 Gen9, mainly because the IPMI on HPE servers (iLO) doesn't require you to actually pay for basic features like virtual console.
I have a Dell T430 (Same generation, just a slightly different configuration) that I used as a NAS and Proxmox host for a while. I kept it in my office all the time and it was never loud enough that it bothered me. The fans were a nice white noise and the only other noise was a ticking/clicking coming from the HDDs in the front. Definitely recommend for a first server! If you're looking for something with a smaller form factor, the dell optiplex micros are great value. (I've since switched out my T430 for a Optiplex 7070 Micro)
For an PCIe slot NVMe boot I used CloverUSB bootloader with nvme drivers. Works like a charm and I am using 4th gen Haswell SFF PC from Fujitsu. It is a Proxmox node, nvme boot drive and VMs, SATA ports are for bulk storage and backup.
I have a T430 for homelabbing, so nearly identical to that one, though the 430 supports dual, faster CPUs, among other things. With mine running a dozen or so VMs, it's idle power draw is ~220w, which is of course far greater than the ideal, but that's fully loaded with disk drives and a dGPU. I'll also say for the iDRAC license, having full remote management with KVM is very well worth it, I found someone on ebay selling licenses for cheap, worth a look!
If you can find a Poweredge VRTX this thing is decked out with up to 4 blades for compute 12 3.5" drives or up to 25 2.5" drives. No idea what they might cost on the used market as we where looking at one of them years ago for a computer science all in one server with hypervisor to run several CS VM's for student projects. They where sold as remote office all in one servers where you could have a 4 note compute cluster running VM's off the shared storage. Your video reminded me of that chunky boy. Talk about the ultimate home lab cluster all in one box. It might double the power bill of your home although.
Man oh man am I a Dell Poweredge fan. I have a rackmount 18-bay T640 for a Fileserver, 24-bay R740xd for an all-in-one Proxmox homelab/Virtual Lab, and a 10-bay R640 as my main Unraid Docker host. I've owned a lot of different brands and servers over the years and I firmly believe that the 13th and 14th generation are some of the best you can get. I almost always recomment R730xd variants for people looking for beefy homelab servers, they have tons of headroom for upgrades and crazy amouts of PCIe slots for addon cards. Also it should be stated that most models under a 430 are gonna be kinda cheap and lacking a bunch of features. The bang for the buck is gonna be with the 430/630/730 as there are thousands of them available on ebay for not much more. Datacenters and corporations use those models the most so you can find parts and upgrades for cheap, and the tower models are going to be pretty quiet for what they are.
I once worked with a Fujitsu workstation board where I couldn't get the iGPU to work, no matter what I did, even BIOS modding did not help. It turned out that the mainboard itself lacked the power phases that power the iGPU. It looks like it's the same on this board: the iGPU power pins are located between the CPU and the back panel, so no power phases there means no iGPU.
You should check out the R series of Poweredges. I currently have an R720 in my homelab, but the R730 would be the same gen as your T330. I think the R series will help with a few of your gripes with the T330. The R720/30 come in SFF and LFF variants which accept 2.5 and 3.5in HDD's respectively.
I think old servers from Dell, HP, Compaq, Lenovo or Fujitsu Siemens are really good. They can be used for file servers/NAS and similar things. The only problem is the unbearable noise the devices make when they start up. And since I'm going to try to shut down my devices at night after the backup, they'll make a hell of a noise when they're turned back on in the morning and that's really unbearable. Otherwise, another great video.
I used a Dell T410 with TrueNAS for years. I replaced the Dell raid card with a LSI raid card and had really amazing performance even on a 1GB LAN. Sound was occasionally a problem and I ran VMs and my primary host on other computers. I retired it when I wanted to downsize my Lab.
I have a microserver n40L and was given the t630 by a client who runs an IT company. He said its cheaper to give them away than to dispose under environmental regulations in the UK. He even provided 25TB of storage in RAID5 and WS2022 but needs activating. Really good to know the power draw isn't awful so I might get it up and running for a media centre too. And yes I know ZFS is better than RAID5 but I've not delved into Linux... yet anyway
When getting a dell server make sure it has idrac enterprise license (the eBay seller of the item will usually specifically state it has enterprise idrac license, if I the seller doesn’t list what license is used you have to assume free/trial/No license, I made that mistake with the 3 cheap dell servers I got the enterprise license per system is more then what I paid for each system) Dell usually has lifecycle controller as well witch allows you to do firmware and bios updates (make sure you update the idrac as there is a risk of it bricking the idrac and built in bmc resulting in a broken motherboard) I also wish I had got the t330 I got the r330 (rack mount) so there footprint is quite large also more noisy then t330
I got a t620 with 8tb storage and 256mb memory for about that price last year. Connected up to a 24disk tray and a homebrew disk array and its storage and apps for days :).
There is idrac workaround to get premium idrac. You have to get a special version of centos that called omsa centos. It lets you change the internal systems asset tag and then you pull over a premium license for idrac that is the asset tag you put on the system. And it will let you activate. Also t330 and t430 are the same motherboard layout t430 is a dual CPU one. Will have to upgrade the power supply but yeah that helps with that.
IDSDM - internal dual SD module. Usually used to install old VMware’s (compatibility was broke when one version decide to put logs at the cards), and some Linux. VMware was the focuses because after boot runs almost entirely from ram.
Yes VMware 7 was known to cause damage to the SD cards in Dell servers. Once we upgraded to 7.0 we saw the iDrac capturing errors on the cards. So we converted from SD cards to the Dell BOSS cards which had dual M.2 sockets in a RAID1 config as a more reliable way to do it.
I’m using one of these as a backup server currently - I really wish it had more pcie lanes, and I wish idrac had kvm without an extra license, but other than that it’s a great system for that use case
I have one of these as a Plex / file server and be aware if you are going to put a DGPU in it you are limited to 45 watts from the PCI-e slot and the PSU doesn't have any options for PCI-e power with out mods. I'm using a Quadro P400 which works great but I plan to upgrade to a Quadro T600 soon.
The dual SD card slot is for having the hypervisor. Usually vmware. That not use swap. And last a lot. Or old enterprise servers have it. And no problem for 5 servers on the last 5 years.
13 часов назад+3
At 12:40 you show the power draw was 33.8 watts. Was this while play videos with all 8 drives connected using the newly upgraded CPU? I have the same model and am considering dusting it off and throwing TrueNas on there.
I can say the the T430 is the perfect home server, mine has dual CPU E5-2630 v3, 192GB of RAM, 1 bay for 8 3.5 inch disks with 4 4tb 2 6tb and 2 2tb, and a additional 5.25 inch adapter to 4 2.5 inch disk with 3 Intel Enterprise SSDs 250 GB each and 1 1TB SSD, running proxmox running 13 VMs between Windows and Linux, also I put a AMD Pro for Plex Transcoding and probably I will upgrade the CPUs to the 2680v4 and install a couple of NVMEs to work as cache devices.
I bought a T130 a while back and almost immediately got buyers regret when I saw a t330 for sale - mostly just because it looks so much cooler. I run two mirrored pcie m.2 adapters with proxmox installed and booting from them via a clover usb boot loader. I ended up not using the HBA at all because of its limitations and getting a minisas to sata cable instead - which also meant I had to get a separate power cable for the DVD drive and disks because the oem one is power and sas combined. It's hacky but was fun to figure out and play with.
"A lot to like... And a lot to get annoyed by" Welcome to full on enterprise hardware mate. They get you coming and going. By comparison, don't even bother with HPE kit without an enterprise support contract. Soooo much is sealed behind an active contract.
Eons ago, I was running HP servers in production, partly because their enterprise management stuff was all Debian based. Then the great lockdown of BIOS updates happened. Bu-bye!
I have almost exactly the same t330. To properly use drives you need to use undocumented flash RAID PERC H730 mini to IT mode - I did for mine and use Proxmox, TrueNas and Jellyfin (with external GPU) without problem. The biggest issue with this server for me is VERY expensive uDIMM RAM
I have one of those with a v6 cpu, 2 hbas and a x8 2.5 inch fujitsu drive cage in two of the 5.25 slots. Its exactly what i need for a solid backup machine. maybe more pcie for a faster nic would be nice, but other than that its really great bang for the buck! the most expensive parts are the drive caddys though :D
I have 3 of the older T310s - one I bought brand new from Dell, the other two I got from ebay. stopped using them due to the power draw, and rising electricity prices. might need to revisit them. There are ways to get the older iDrac licensed with all the good features.
I have a Dell R730 - the rackmount dual-CPU version. Works well as a cheap way to have 80 hyperthreads and 256Gb RAM - eBay is a buyers market at the moment, often sellers accept offers below the listed price. I put a Tesla P4 in for transcoding, but I probably need to work out a better storage solution than the 8x800Gb SAS drives.
I got a dell t620 for free and it is a beast for what i need especially with 256gb of ram. I put 10x 8tb hdds in it along side a cache ssd and 2x 120gb boot drives in mirror. I’m about to put in a gtx 1650 in for transcoding on my plex server.
I'm setting up a T630 right now. Despite the name, it's only a Xeon v3-v4, but it exist in a rare-ish 18 LFF disks configuration. It's awesome to replace my NetApp disk shelf (which use 60w by itself). And there is still a full size bay, perfect for a sweet Icy Dock, tape drive or Bluray riping machine. For the HBA, maybe try a card flashed with an IT firmware. "HBA mode" isn't that transparent as they say, and the original firmware can be hit or miss with PCIe passtrough. I really wish there was a more modern version, or a way to put an ATX motherboard inside. Those Supermicro cases are outrageously rare and expensive.
You are able to boot to NVME by using a USB with Clover to act as an intermediary bootloader. I have my Clover USB plugged into the internal USB port inside my R720. I have RaidZ1 NVME drives for Proxmox.
0:20 I have a very similar model at work with dual E5 CPUs that I use as one of my linux fileservers. I have more than 300TB of storage at work on about 5 fileservers with 2 of them being rack mounted. I have the exact same comment as you did. It's surprisingly good in some ways and infuriating in others.
Oh wow i literally bought a t330 2 weeks ago for $100. For that price i feel the compromises are much more bearable. Transcoding is great with a quadro p400 i picked up for $30
I've been using a T320 I purchased for $30 CAD as a UNRAID server for a few months now. Works great! Also I know of a site where you can get extended license trials for Dirac 6, and 7. Let me know if you want them!
Not usually one to comment but when I saw the poweredge I was excited until I realized it was a tower... you should take a look at some of their R series servers I have a R710 and R720 sitting in my rack right now and love them! Would be interested to see your opinion on some "real" servers... XD
the fans can be tamed with a little effort...mine run silently the 8 or 16 drive bays are really useful the T620 is a beast, I have 384GB RAM in mine and dual xeon E5-2680v2, giving me 20 core/40 threads
I must have a slightly later version of this, I definitely have the Xeon with iGPU and can use it for transcoding. I got it 5 or 6 years ago from a client who was upgrading their entire setup. With a better fan and some tinkering with the fan speed it runs very quiet.
Dell has a well-established history of being able to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. If Dell built bicycles, they would build them with everything correct except the front wheel being 90 degrees off-axis.
We still have a bunch of these in service mostly as backup servers running Truenas. Most of these are sitting in server rooms so we generally didn't mess with the fans but Noctua or Arctic fans work as replacements and there are scripts floating around out there to control the fans.
That intro beat hits every time !🎵
Still waiting for the soundcloud album
Yeah I want that track starting at 7:19
I’m Japanese and I got this for $50 (¥8000) and it’s amazing for the price. Manually setting fan speed with ipmitool brought it near silent with 8 bays all populated.
you can set the fan speed in the idrac normally 30% is minimum, but you can get low as 300rpm and if this is still too fast you can set the gain and an offset if you want 0 rpm. normaly you set your minimum % fan speed and then your temperature value for 100% fan speed. the rest does the controller by its self. I have a R630 and its annoyingly loud too but i used only the minimum % fan speed and kept the 85°C for 100%. The PowerEdge controls the fans by inlet and outlet Temperature, not by CPU load or CPU temperature. you have over 15 temperature sensors on your Mainboard, your Drive Backplane, front IO borad and in your PSUs. i don't know exactly how the PID for the fans is setup but even the temperatures of your Drives and PCIe Devises is included, that is why Dell wants you to buy only compatible hardware from their tested list. But this doesn't mean none compatible hardware doesn't work.
For PCIE devises and drives there are standards, and normally they work without issues unless there is a weird hardware or firmware bug.
the same Skylake-based system for $50?!
Yeah, it came with E3-1220 V6 and 16GB RAM but it had only one HDD tray so I had to buy these from aliexpress.
@@reinekewf7987 R630s like Noctuas, BTW. :) And you can add extra intake/extake to it with an additional fan controller and make it very quiet, over-all. Not T320/420 quiet, but still. :)
Regarding the IOMMU Errors: Your PCI Devices are sorted in IOMMU Groups. When passing through a PCI Device you MUST pass through all Devices in this Group. It’s also important to disregard any type of PCI Bridges when passing through. You can avoid this by using Linux Kernels like Linux Zen that use ACS Patching and thereby „alter“ the IOMMU Groups. After doing that, you can pass through anything you wan‘t given it has its own group
I have one running, replaced the stock fan with a Noctua fan and the noise improved a lot.
I’ve had a T330 since picking it up for $300 7 years ago. It works great for my needs as a simple home server.
Thanks again Colton. You always show off the best in reusable computing.
as somebody who has running multiple servers in my homelab. The PowerEdge-Towers or HP MLs are pretty good if you have the space where you can put them (not only cause of their size, also because of the noise). the Gen8 was the peak of the HP Microservers. If you had one and upgraded to the max you are probably still working with these guys. there was also a matching switch from HP for those servers. we used them in branch offices as Fileserver, secondary DC. personally in my home lab I tend to the Minisforum MS-01 (got 3 now for a cluster) and a DS1621+ from Synology where also 2X10Gbit is installed. this is a pretty good setup for home envoirement without paying to much for electricity or having cooling issues
As someone who has worked on dell poweredge professionally for the last 8 years. I was kind of happy to see a dell get some home lab love. Was also surprised how much power that T server pulled. I have an r720xd and at idle mine pulled around 130w. I do understand the difference, but still cool to see the differences in the T lineup.
I know there were some variations of the T model with 16 drive bays in the front.
You can get idrac licensing for dirt cheap for the older models pretty easily. Don't let that steer anyone away from getting one of these.
The T330 is a generation newer. With a T320 you face a minimum of 60 watts...
@@frankniethardt1813 Mehhhh you can get a T320/420 down pretty low in Watts using SSD, Noctua fans, and well-directed air-flow with the fantastic E5-2450L v2 processors. The RAM takes some power too, I know but you can use larger capacity DIMMs so it helps. :)
Those dell poweredge towers are so cool man. Especially this era with the amount of ways you can configure it.
Would love to see you upgrade this unit. Of course if you make videos explaining what upgrades work and how to install them the prices on eBay will go way up. How about a “make it an all around server/nas” video?
The child of this and a Dell 5820 would be my budget homelab dream. The only things missing on the 5820 are a couple extra drive bays (it has 4. I'd love 6, and 8 would obviously be even better), enterprise-level management, and transcoding but that's a harder limitation obviously. It can use Intel i-series CPUs, but the obvious choice is a Xeon for massive PCIe and ECC memory
At 2:57
"....before taking something apart I always like to make sure it's working...."
That used to not be the case! When I first started watching your channel you used to take things apart before you check to see if they worked. You even mentioned that something didn't work when you put it back together and you had no idea if it worked before that so you don't know if you did something or if it was broke when you got it.
I used to like watching your videos because you were very into cleaning the computer, and for some reason I enjoyed watching that. You have migrated to other types of videos but I still like them....this video appears to give you a chance to go back to your roots!!
That's generally bigger than I need but I'm sure someone has a use for it. In any case I love seeing systems like that here. Thanks as always!
I have a T330 as a home server myself. Great machine. You can even have wheels for it. I replaced the fan with a Corsair ML120, had to set a minimum PWM to maintain a minimal air flow, but it keeps the system cool enough and quite...
I hadn't have a need for Intel QuickSync, yet...
Great video as usual! I bought a Lenovo TS460 for about $100 on Craigslist last year. It’s my first home server - I was inspired by your videos to try my hand converting a used system into a home nas. I went with Unraid OS, and kept the optical drive for ripping DVDs (inspired by a similar build you did in a previous video). The Dell in this video seems like similar system to mine (albeit without the proprietary Lenovo stuff). Cool to see you also using a “small business server” - thanks for the top quality content!
Wolfgang has a video on his channel called "Don't Make This Mistake Building a Home Server!" He talks there abbout IPMI and integrated GPU. He made essentialy same misstake :)
Great video!! I love these old servers. I've got a Dell and an HP 1U server. I just enjoy reusing old hardware like this. Fun times!
a video on upgrading to noctua fans would be awesome!
Well - that's basically removing the old fan and inserting the new fan. I used the NF-F12 iPPC-3000 - and it's making way less noise
I got the bigger T430, swapped out the cpu and rear coolers for Noctua ones, almost no noise. Not booting from the NVME is annoying, but you can install Clover on those internal SD cards. Keep an eye out on the Ebay descriptions, mine came with an enterprise license for iDrac, super useful - all the bios / other updates can be done from there. Loving the server, with 4 HDDs, 2x E5-2660 V4, 256gb ram, and a 2070RTX, the power draw was just under 100W. Running proxmox of course :)
I have a T630 (big brother to the T330) and I love it! I also got a T320 with it but my friend is borrowing it right now, but both systems are perfect for pretty much anything you can throw at them!
I love the Dells from this generation. They look so cool.
At that price, it might just be a good chassis for a NAS that uses off the shelf components. Last I looked, a chassis with front bays alone was $300+, if you snag a T330 (or older) and already have a NAS system looking for a new home, you might just have struck gold. The standoff layout seems to match ATX, and at 4U you have plenty a cooler that fits in there.
I also have a t330 that I bought last year, and I was able to get it to boot from an m.2 nvme ssd by using a workaround. I flashed a separate boot manager on a super cheap tiny flash drive that I leave plugged in to the front of the server, and then direct the boot manager to boot from the pcie slot. I think the boot manager also needed the pcie drivers for the server. If you want to try this, let me know, and I will check which boot manager it is.
I commented the same. I use clover bootloader from github
Cool project... I love seeing old servers being given a new lease on life
Loved the editing on this one, was the perfect mix of fun and information delivery!
These are pretty nice machines, at the right price. I considered getting a couple of these, but decided to pick up a couple Define R5s. Not sure what hardware I'm putting in them yet, but I do have an X99 board laying around, along with an X299 board, not sure if that one works though. Same issue with drives, no idea what to put in these. I'll figure that one out eventually though.
That's a good entry level server. I love the fact that it sips power not doing much.
Great video! I have one and I think it's amazing. I have it setup as a cold-storage zfs-backup and for that purpose it works great. I would LOVE if it had 12 3.5" bays but I can only dream.
I live in a quite small apartment, but I would love to have this machine in a semi-remote location like a cellar or something like that. Cold-storage is surely a great boost to data security.
Got a T420 that’s been everywhere between bare metal Ubuntu Server/Windows Server, to Proxmox/Esxi. Primary uses have been file sharing for the 10Gbase-T home lan, game server hosting, test grounds for software and scripts, and even at one point I had the PfSense gateway virtualized running through it on top of everything else.
Whether I throw just a couple of things at it or everything and anything, I know I can count on that old chunky metal bastard.
I have a T320 as my home server, they were dirt cheap for a while (~$100 equivalent) so i picked up a couple (the other is for spare parts). I ran in to the same problem with bifurcation preventing multiple NVME SSDs in the same PCI-e, but as i too have the dual SD-card thing i installed with /boot on it and the rest on an NVME. Other than that the CPU is E5-2420v2 and i managed to scrounge up 88 GB of RAM for it, i have 3x16 TB in RAIDZ1 for mass storage, a pair of older 8TB for backups (i swap those with another pair at regular intervals to have an offline offsite backup as well.
I run Ubuntu as the base OS and pfSense in a VM is my main router/firewall (one of the ports on the back is dedicated to the VM for WAN, the other i LAN and is bridged with the host system, most other things i run in docker containers.
I was given a new, old stock T320. I've had a blast beefing it up. It was the base desktop model without redundant power supplies, and no front drive bays. I've added a HBA, and filled the four internal bays, added 48GB of ram, and threw in a E5-2470 CPU. I ran into the same issue as you did when I put in an NVMe drive with a PCIe adater. I was able to boot to it using a very specific version of Clover UEFI, which is installed on a flash drive inserted into the internal USB port. You might be able to use the internal SD slot for the same. So far, it's been a pretty solid unit! It's been choochin' along with Jellyfin on Proxmox with a P400 for transcoding.
I have a T320 with E5-2470V2 and 48GB RAM
lovely machine, near silent
I might upgrade it to 96GB using 8x 16GB DIMMs
I didn't do anything fancy with booting, just stuffed an SSD into it, hooked upto one of the two onboard SATA connectors, and boot proxmox off it, all my VMs are hosted on the 8x 3TB drives I have
Excellent presentation. Thank you. These videos on repurposing old hardware are great.
agree, could be good for specific use case given the "cheap" used price compared to a new one. BTW, you could also use a brush to clean PC's along side with the vacuum cleaner for completely dry cleaning.
I had a T620, an even older machine, still
In production as truenas. These machines are solid af!
I used a T430 for over 6 years as my main file server, and it was pretty great if you're ok with the limitations. dual socket E5, gives more power and options for desired config, and the 3 optical bays were perfect for putting a 5x3.5" cage. I got mine for free from my job at the time, so it was worth dropping some money on CPU, RAM and HDD upgrades. iDRAC licenses can be had on ebay for pretty cheap, but it is a pain for sure. adjusting the fan speed with some commands helps a lot, but it still sucks to only have the one fan for the whole system. I rigged up a couple extras for my drive cage and PCIE cards with a sata adapter.
i would suggest adding fan to RAID card (whatever it is called) as cooler gets blazingly hot, and also checking battery on its other side (it likes to expand over time).
I ran a very similar dell T430 for my homelab. Proxmox with passthrough for HBA to a Truenas VM(dont remember how I got that to work) makes a great all-in-one homelab machine.
About the iGPU - if you want to use it, you really need a board that has some video output connectors from the CPU (dp/hdmi/dvi) and not just the iLO's VGA. I found the same issue with the Supermicro X10SLE-F boards (its a previous - 4th generation Haswell platform) and the documentation explicitly says that if you install a gpu enabled cpu (with 5 instead of 0 as the last/fourth digit), then that iGPU will be not used. If I recall correctly, they blamed the limitation to the low/entry level chipset model - but that is just a stupid excuse, as are all chipset related limitations, even that the thing is a CPU part (like the PEG and IMC)
that's is right but the igpu isn't disabled it has no output you have to set a software frame buffer path. then you are able to use the iGPU for transcoding but you are limmited to RAM speed or Drive Speed depending on your path. RAM does give you better frame times but reduces the overall system performance significantly. The matrox g200 that the t630 uses is inside the Aspeed IPMI controller, where the idrac lives and is primarly used for video encoding. Matrox only does video transcoder not GPUs. i have worked in the past in a server farm, and they had r830 and r840 stacked full of matrox M264 S4 encoder cards, each of them capable of up to 400 parallel streams.
Been running Unraid on a T330 for a few years, and it's been great
I used to have a Poweredge R720 as my home server, but I switched to HPE ML110 Gen9, mainly because the IPMI on HPE servers (iLO) doesn't require you to actually pay for basic features like virtual console.
I remember spending quite a bit of time looking for a case just like that. Very cool system
I have a Dell T430 (Same generation, just a slightly different configuration) that I used as a NAS and Proxmox host for a while. I kept it in my office all the time and it was never loud enough that it bothered me. The fans were a nice white noise and the only other noise was a ticking/clicking coming from the HDDs in the front. Definitely recommend for a first server! If you're looking for something with a smaller form factor, the dell optiplex micros are great value. (I've since switched out my T430 for a Optiplex 7070 Micro)
i have a t430 but don't see how a dell 7070 micro can hold 80tb of hard drives. like, that's what these servers are for.
For an PCIe slot NVMe boot I used CloverUSB bootloader with nvme drivers. Works like a charm and I am using 4th gen Haswell SFF PC from Fujitsu. It is a Proxmox node, nvme boot drive and VMs, SATA ports are for bulk storage and backup.
I had a T320 and used a Noctua Fan Speed Noise Reducer on the chassis fan and it worked great.
I have a T430 for homelabbing, so nearly identical to that one, though the 430 supports dual, faster CPUs, among other things. With mine running a dozen or so VMs, it's idle power draw is ~220w, which is of course far greater than the ideal, but that's fully loaded with disk drives and a dGPU. I'll also say for the iDRAC license, having full remote management with KVM is very well worth it, I found someone on ebay selling licenses for cheap, worth a look!
If you can find a Poweredge VRTX this thing is decked out with up to 4 blades for compute 12 3.5" drives or up to 25 2.5" drives. No idea what they might cost on the used market as we where looking at one of them years ago for a computer science all in one server with hypervisor to run several CS VM's for student projects. They where sold as remote office all in one servers where you could have a 4 note compute cluster running VM's off the shared storage. Your video reminded me of that chunky boy. Talk about the ultimate home lab cluster all in one box. It might double the power bill of your home although.
I have a t320 as my production server, its a really neat tower, running proxmox on it
I bought a dell precision 5820 for a home server… love it. It’s a lot quieter too…
Man oh man am I a Dell Poweredge fan. I have a rackmount 18-bay T640 for a Fileserver, 24-bay R740xd for an all-in-one Proxmox homelab/Virtual Lab, and a 10-bay R640 as my main Unraid Docker host. I've owned a lot of different brands and servers over the years and I firmly believe that the 13th and 14th generation are some of the best you can get. I almost always recomment R730xd variants for people looking for beefy homelab servers, they have tons of headroom for upgrades and crazy amouts of PCIe slots for addon cards.
Also it should be stated that most models under a 430 are gonna be kinda cheap and lacking a bunch of features. The bang for the buck is gonna be with the 430/630/730 as there are thousands of them available on ebay for not much more. Datacenters and corporations use those models the most so you can find parts and upgrades for cheap, and the tower models are going to be pretty quiet for what they are.
I once worked with a Fujitsu workstation board where I couldn't get the iGPU to work, no matter what I did, even BIOS modding did not help.
It turned out that the mainboard itself lacked the power phases that power the iGPU.
It looks like it's the same on this board: the iGPU power pins are located between the CPU and the back panel, so no power phases there means no iGPU.
You should check out the R series of Poweredges. I currently have an R720 in my homelab, but the R730 would be the same gen as your T330. I think the R series will help with a few of your gripes with the T330. The R720/30 come in SFF and LFF variants which accept 2.5 and 3.5in HDD's respectively.
I think old servers from Dell, HP, Compaq, Lenovo or Fujitsu Siemens are really good. They can be used for file servers/NAS and similar things. The only problem is the unbearable noise the devices make when they start up. And since I'm going to try to shut down my devices at night after the backup, they'll make a hell of a noise when they're turned back on in the morning and that's really unbearable. Otherwise, another great video.
I use a T630 (the dual cpu version of this) and it’s pretty usable once the fan speed is adjusted.
I can’t believe you power consumption is so low though. I draw around 180 watts at idle (I probably have to tune that).
This channel has everything!
The CPU is exactly same silicon as a desktop CPU, the only difference is the enablement of ECC (this depends on having a C2xx chipset).
I used a Dell T410 with TrueNAS for years. I replaced the Dell raid card with a LSI raid card and had really amazing performance even on a 1GB LAN. Sound was occasionally a problem and I ran VMs and my primary host on other computers. I retired it when I wanted to downsize my Lab.
Been running bigger brother of this - T630 - in various configurations - one of the most versatile line of servers.
I have a microserver n40L and was given the t630 by a client who runs an IT company. He said its cheaper to give them away than to dispose under environmental regulations in the UK. He even provided 25TB of storage in RAID5 and WS2022 but needs activating. Really good to know the power draw isn't awful so I might get it up and running for a media centre too. And yes I know ZFS is better than RAID5 but I've not delved into Linux... yet anyway
When getting a dell server make sure it has idrac enterprise license (the eBay seller of the item will usually specifically state it has enterprise idrac license, if I the seller doesn’t list what license is used you have to assume free/trial/No license, I made that mistake with the 3 cheap dell servers I got the enterprise license per system is more then what I paid for each system)
Dell usually has lifecycle controller as well witch allows you to do firmware and bios updates (make sure you update the idrac as there is a risk of it bricking the idrac and built in bmc resulting in a broken motherboard)
I also wish I had got the t330 I got the r330 (rack mount) so there footprint is quite large also more noisy then t330
I got a t620 with 8tb storage and 256mb memory for about that price last year. Connected up to a 24disk tray and a homebrew disk array and its storage and apps for days :).
I love my chonker of a Dell Poweredge T420. It's got everything I need, which is good because it would be physically hard to replace.
There is idrac workaround to get premium idrac. You have to get a special version of centos that called omsa centos. It lets you change the internal systems asset tag and then you pull over a premium license for idrac that is the asset tag you put on the system. And it will let you activate. Also t330 and t430 are the same motherboard layout t430 is a dual CPU one. Will have to upgrade the power supply but yeah that helps with that.
IDSDM - internal dual SD module. Usually used to install old VMware’s (compatibility was broke when one version decide to put logs at the cards), and some Linux. VMware was the focuses because after boot runs almost entirely from ram.
Yes VMware 7 was known to cause damage to the SD cards in Dell servers. Once we upgraded to 7.0 we saw the iDrac capturing errors on the cards. So we converted from SD cards to the Dell BOSS cards which had dual M.2 sockets in a RAID1 config as a more reliable way to do it.
I liked it and was something I was looking as an option to buy, my main setback is the price, especially if you buy to replace the motherboard
I’m using one of these as a backup server currently - I really wish it had more pcie lanes, and I wish idrac had kvm without an extra license, but other than that it’s a great system for that use case
I have one of these as a Plex / file server and be aware if you are going to put a DGPU in it you are limited to 45 watts from the PCI-e slot and the PSU doesn't have any options for PCI-e power with out mods. I'm using a Quadro P400 which works great but I plan to upgrade to a Quadro T600 soon.
The dual SD card slot is for having the hypervisor. Usually vmware. That not use swap. And last a lot. Or old enterprise servers have it. And no problem for 5 servers on the last 5 years.
At 12:40 you show the power draw was 33.8 watts. Was this while play videos with all 8 drives connected using the newly upgraded CPU? I have the same model and am considering dusting it off and throwing TrueNas on there.
I can say the the T430 is the perfect home server, mine has dual CPU E5-2630 v3, 192GB of RAM, 1 bay for 8 3.5 inch disks with 4 4tb 2 6tb and 2 2tb, and a additional 5.25 inch adapter to 4 2.5 inch disk with 3 Intel Enterprise SSDs 250 GB each and 1 1TB SSD, running proxmox running 13 VMs between Windows and Linux, also I put a AMD Pro for Plex Transcoding and probably I will upgrade the CPUs to the 2680v4 and install a couple of NVMEs to work as cache devices.
I bought a T130 a while back and almost immediately got buyers regret when I saw a t330 for sale - mostly just because it looks so much cooler.
I run two mirrored pcie m.2 adapters with proxmox installed and booting from them via a clover usb boot loader.
I ended up not using the HBA at all because of its limitations and getting a minisas to sata cable instead - which also meant I had to get a separate power cable for the DVD drive and disks because the oem one is power and sas combined.
It's hacky but was fun to figure out and play with.
I use one of these from my TrueNAS backup server. They're dirt cheap and it's run for years at a time 100% uptime without issue
"A lot to like... And a lot to get annoyed by"
Welcome to full on enterprise hardware mate. They get you coming and going. By comparison, don't even bother with HPE kit without an enterprise support contract. Soooo much is sealed behind an active contract.
Luckily the MD5 and SHA hashes for the firmware upgrades aren't gatekept 🤣
Eons ago, I was running HP servers in production, partly because their enterprise management stuff was all Debian based. Then the great lockdown of BIOS updates happened. Bu-bye!
I have almost exactly the same t330.
To properly use drives you need to use undocumented flash RAID PERC H730 mini to IT mode - I did for mine and use Proxmox, TrueNas and Jellyfin (with external GPU) without problem. The biggest issue with this server for me is VERY expensive uDIMM RAM
I have one of those with a v6 cpu, 2 hbas and a x8 2.5 inch fujitsu drive cage in two of the 5.25 slots. Its exactly what i need for a solid backup machine. maybe more pcie for a faster nic would be nice, but other than that its really great bang for the buck! the most expensive parts are the drive caddys though :D
I have 3 of the older T310s - one I bought brand new from Dell, the other two I got from ebay. stopped using them due to the power draw, and rising electricity prices. might need to revisit them.
There are ways to get the older iDrac licensed with all the good features.
I have a T320 with an E5-2450L v2, also replaced the fan with a noctua and im quite happy with it. Mine was also very dusty haha
I have a Dell R730 - the rackmount dual-CPU version. Works well as a cheap way to have 80 hyperthreads and 256Gb RAM - eBay is a buyers market at the moment, often sellers accept offers below the listed price. I put a Tesla P4 in for transcoding, but I probably need to work out a better storage solution than the 8x800Gb SAS drives.
What kinda watts is that thing pulling?
I got a dell t620 for free and it is a beast for what i need especially with 256gb of ram. I put 10x 8tb hdds in it along side a cache ssd and 2x 120gb boot drives in mirror. I’m about to put in a gtx 1650 in for transcoding on my plex server.
I'm setting up a T630 right now. Despite the name, it's only a Xeon v3-v4, but it exist in a rare-ish 18 LFF disks configuration. It's awesome to replace my NetApp disk shelf (which use 60w by itself). And there is still a full size bay, perfect for a sweet Icy Dock, tape drive or Bluray riping machine.
For the HBA, maybe try a card flashed with an IT firmware. "HBA mode" isn't that transparent as they say, and the original firmware can be hit or miss with PCIe passtrough.
I really wish there was a more modern version, or a way to put an ATX motherboard inside. Those Supermicro cases are outrageously rare and expensive.
For a small small home lab this might actually be ok! Not all of us need 12 plus bays etc
I been rocking my T320 (more or less same machine) ..very fast and power efficient running Plex and a few VMs without any issues
You are able to boot to NVME by using a USB with Clover to act as an intermediary bootloader. I have my Clover USB plugged into the internal USB port inside my R720. I have RaidZ1 NVME drives for Proxmox.
For it’s specs, it’s a nice room heater or an anchor.
Looks like a great platform for a FreeBSD byhve hypervisor with a whole heck of a lot of drives for a zfs array! I may pick onea these up...
0:20 I have a very similar model at work with dual E5 CPUs that I use as one of my linux fileservers. I have more than 300TB of storage at work on about 5 fileservers with 2 of them being rack mounted. I have the exact same comment as you did. It's surprisingly good in some ways and infuriating in others.
Oh wow i literally bought a t330 2 weeks ago for $100. For that price i feel the compromises are much more bearable. Transcoding is great with a quadro p400 i picked up for $30
The fan speed sound had me laughing so hard haha
i managed to get a T440 and a T320- they are great systems! im looking at putting a second CPU in the t440, and trying some plex shenanigans.
yeah for home server use the high end workstations can be a bit nicer, though the low power draw here is nice.
I've been using a T320 I purchased for $30 CAD as a UNRAID server for a few months now. Works great! Also I know of a site where you can get extended license trials for Dirac 6, and 7. Let me know if you want them!
I have a DELL T430 !! It’s been great for what I need
I'm about to get a free t430. Can you tell me about your setup/config? Trying to decide what to do it. Thanks!
Not usually one to comment but when I saw the poweredge I was excited until I realized it was a tower... you should take a look at some of their R series servers I have a R710 and R720 sitting in my rack right now and love them! Would be interested to see your opinion on some "real" servers... XD
I have a T620, a T420 and a T320, all previous generation to the T330
they are wonderful home lab servers
the fans can be tamed with a little effort...mine run silently
the 8 or 16 drive bays are really useful
the T620 is a beast, I have 384GB RAM in mine and dual xeon E5-2680v2, giving me 20 core/40 threads
also and an idea: install win server on a drive and install dsu it updates all the devices and firmware. i worked with dell systems in the past
Cool as always, Colten!
I must have a slightly later version of this, I definitely have the Xeon with iGPU and can use it for transcoding. I got it 5 or 6 years ago from a client who was upgrading their entire setup. With a better fan and some tinkering with the fan speed it runs very quiet.
Can we get more detailed model number, bios version, and CPU stepping from y'all? That would be ideal ...
Dell has a well-established history of being able to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. If Dell built bicycles, they would build them with everything correct except the front wheel being 90 degrees off-axis.
if you go with the hp 8th gen microserver make sure you pick up a fdd male to sata female cable so you can throw an ssd in it
I bought a T430 yesterday😂
I've been using a Dell T620 12 bay since 2018 as a home server. a bit power hungry but very stable