This is just out of curiosity but maybe helps others in a world where RAM is a luxury and NAS systems seem to be advertised for anything and everything BUT being a NAS.
My oldest NAS is a HP Microserver Gen6. It has an AMD Turion II Neo N40L Dual-Core Processor with 8 GB of DDR3 ECC UDIMMs. I bought it new many years ago when it was the most current offering around 2013 and upgraded it to 8 GB since it came with 4, gave it an IPMI card and FreeNAS on a USB Stick.
It holds 5 2TB 7.2k disks (some of them even consumer drives) in RAIDZ1 running TrueNAS 13 U6.8. The disks have a lot of hours on them, around 8-10 years, I guess. I only had to swap one since. And the USB Stick once.
It runs great. Absolutely rock solid. Yes, it could be faster but honestly, why should it? It is a backup target and that’s it. And yes, that’s even possible with the “oh god, how can anyone survive with this in 2026” 1GbE NIC.
Any one else with systems that “obsolete” in (homelab) production or at least as secondary target?
I have an Alienware Aurora (Dell) that has a shipped date of March 25, 2010. It uses triple channel RAM and I have 18GB. The MB tops out at 24GB. It has an Intel x520 10Gbps fiber card.
I have put my hands on an old Fujitsu D2779 with an i3 540 and 2gb of ECC ram, for about 8€.
Sell as not working, i easily manage to revive it; the real problem is the shitty layout, i have to adapt some case to fit this .
It has udimm ECC supports, 6 sata ports, intel 1gbps nic, integrated video adapter, it works with standard atx psu… i plan to put it somewhere as offsite backup (i already have a backup nas here, but not elsewhere), but i didn’t decided yet if upgrade the ram and put on it TN… or just use it with Alpine and make some rsync over VPN
Mine is a Microserver Gen8 with the E3-1220L and its max of 16 GB of RAM and two 16 TB disks mirrored. Onboard GbE and of course iLO, and it’s running 13.3. I’ll probably get it on SCALE at some point, but it’s serving as a Time Machine server for my parents, and a replication target for me.
Are you running Core or Scale on it? Or even FreeNAS still? 18GB RAM is quite nice even for now since most pre-built consumer NAS don’t even come with 16 GB.
If you decide to use it the (used) RAM will most likely be 5-10 times the price of the whole system right now, unfortunately. Still cheaper than even consumer RAM. But looks like a nice secondary or tertiary target.
As much as I dislike modern HP, those Microservers are still reliable. I have the weaker Gen8 aswell with a little less RAM. Don’t want to update it either.
…and hard to beat for a proper server (including ECC and remote management) in a small-ish form factor. I’m not aware of anything else that competes, really. Though it’s ridiculous that it took until Gen 11 to put a m.2 socket onboard.
16 years old system and still running the current version of TrueNAS. And people now complain if a NAS has a processor that’s “already 4 years old” and question if it can run anything any more. Why did we forget what a NAS was and start to think NAS stands “New AI System”?
Two 2009 and one 2012 Mac Pro, all with 128GB of RAM and dual 6-core Xeon X5690’s @ 3.47GHz.
Two of them are still running ESXi 6.7 and the third is now running Proxmox 9. Each has a TrueNAS VM. One ESXi VM is running CORE and the other two hosts’s VM’s are now running SCALE.
The CORE VM has 16GB of RAM assigned to it and six SATA spinners passed through for 42TB of storage and runs production loads (not heavy by any means).
The other two SCALE VM’s have 48GB of RAM. One has six spinning disks for about 15TB and the other on Proxmox has six Samsung SSD’s for 6TB of space. Both are handling lab needs for now, with the ESXi machine acting as off-site backup for the other ESXi server.
DDR3 ecc are still affordable! Honestly it annoyes me to spent more on shipping/tax then the RAM Itself given that i have no rush, i’m probing if something to buy come from a local seller.
If it helps, the TrueNAS VM only has 3 cores and 16GB of RAM assigned to it. And it looks like I haven’t upgraded it since 2022. And the SATA bus is only SATA II.
The 2013-era 512GB SSD I passed through to the VM (that doesn’t do anything) is now complaining about wear leveling. And one of the HDD’s is starting to throw errors. It’s probably time to migrate the loads somewhere else and bring the machine down for a refresh.
My first FreeNAS server was a SGI Rackable Systems setup with a half depth 2 RU server with 2x Xeons and 32 GB DDR2 RAM maxed and a Rackable Systems 16 bay disc shelf. The server has been long retired, but I still use that old disk shelf for backup storage loaded with 16 x 2 TB drives.
I still have a HP Microserver Gen7 N40L from 2012 that I used to run FreeNAS on, now runs Scale raidz1, 4wide. It’s running in the corner of the room headless and push backups to. I’ve never had an issue with it, just keep it vacuumed out from time to time, lol.
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given that i have no rush, i’m probing if something to buy come from a local seller.
