Study Server - will it work?

[madman045]

Going to build a server for home use / studying

Will initially be running 2003 server, exchange server & anything else I throw at it.

not having loads to spend, I am thinking of this.

£105.12
AMD *Retail* Opteron UP Model 146 (2000MHz) 64bit CPU (S939) 1024L2 Cache
£164.25
2Gb (2x1Gb) Corsair DDR400/PC3200,2x128Mx64, non-ECC, 2x184 DIMM, Unbuffered, CL3
£46.17
Asrock 939DUAL-SATA2 S939 PCI-E/AGP USB2 Lan 7.1Ch Audio
£80.85
250GB Samsung SpinPoint P120S (SP2504C) 7200rpm, 8MB, SATA II

Will that all work together ok & will the Asrock take the Opteron straight out of the box as I dont have another 939 chip to flash the bios?

Thanks

[herulach]

Should be fine, although depending on what you are going to be serving up id go for more/bigger disks and a gig of ram. (2gb is overkill for the great majority of things, exceptions being terminal server, large databases and other enterprise style stuff)

[Moby-Dick]

For studying thats overkill


If you want to have a play with exchange / VMware then you can get away with much lower spec kit.

I've got a dual PIII 900 with a Gig of PC 133 that will do the job just fine for less than the price of that CPU

[arthurleung]

Something like Sempron is more than enough. For Home server you're probably looking for 512MB ram even if you run Bittorrent stuff.

Depends on if you're going to P2P or not, 250GB is pretty tiny

[killie99]

250GB is pretty tiny

It's only tiny if you use it all. I have a server running with 2 x 120G drives in it and that's more than plenty for what I'm using it for. If the OP is happy to start with 250Gb I'm sure he's figured out how much disk space he's going to need, and anyway, dead simple to add more drives as you need them.

I have to agree though 2G memory is a bit overkill!

If you're really wanting to maximise the capability of your server then seariously think about putting in a gigabit lan - not a great amount of money involved (I paid £50 for a netgear 5 port router and 4 netgear gigabit lan cards). Makes moving large amounts of data an absolute dream.

[hardflipman]

you seriously don't need a system like that.
i have an old dell optiplex g110 i think p3 400 with 256mb ram and a 40 gig drive running 2003 server and it's fine for general use.
for study stuff i just vmware on my main machine. following the microsoft guides you don't need more than 10gig drive for it...

i'd just picj up a cheap shuttle or other sff and stick cheap stuff in it so you've got a small cheap server...

[six5tring]

I run my home 2003sbs on a 1800xp+ with 1gb RAM. Works a treat definatly happier with 1gb though 512mb was pushing it really!

Six

ps. I stuggled running SBS on an old 400(ish)mhz 192mb unit, couldn't verify packets etc fast enough so logons became tedious. Now takes around 10-15secs using roaming profiles.

[madman045]

Thanks for the comments guys.

Id use my main rig, but with 1gb, i can only run 3 VMs at anyone time & thats not much use at the moment.

main rig is XP Pro, 1GB, P4 3.2

I have a p3 933 with 512mb, but with Windows 2003 Standard Server & 2003 Exchange installed, it was taking 20 mins to load.

I have 2003 Server, 2003 Exchange, WSUS, MOM 2005, ISA Server & was also looking at testing XP 64, also got windows virtual server 2005 to try with that lot.

Would prefer a dedicated rig to do it on though & with 2GB, I could run a small network off one PC without effecting my own machine. AD with policies etc...

[Moby-Dick]

I can run all of that with this

http://forums.hexus.net/showthread.p...light=proliant

apart from the xp64