Well yes, this old servers are súper cheap, i got my r510 for $150 but it didn't came with disks or disk trays so I had to add another $300 just on 10 trays (so I can have 2 spares) and 8 2tb disks, plus another $200 trying to find a good option raid card and SPF optical 10gb network card, I had to buy several until I came with the right one. Then I find 2 EMC enclosures very cheap with their 2tb disks because they are format on 510 sector's and no body wants them, so I reformat then on 512 and I had another 2 enclosures with 15 2tb disks each for around $500. I thought after this I was done but I end up finding that r910 for just $275 with 120gb or ram, 4 xeons and comes with 16 bays for 2.5, I couldn't resist and spend that money lol.
So I took the ram on my r510 to end up with 184gb but then I had the problem of the disks that are 3.5 as I couldn't have in on the r910 chassis. So I came up with the idea of using the r510 as an enclosure, I just get 2 pretty long raid card cables, connect them on back plane of the r510 and in to another card that goes on a back tray like it was a raid, network or any other card but it doesn't hook to any pci socket. In the inside goes the regular cables of the back plane and the outside the cables that are use for enclosures, I did the same on the r910 but backwards, connect the cables from the r510 to the r910 and then from the inside of the r910 to a h200.
So if my calculation is a little accurate, with like $1000 I have a server with 64 cores of xeons 2.26, 184 of ram (that can go up to 512) and 38 2tb disks, 4 1200 power supplies, with a lot of room to grow even more. Is just a matter of ingenuity.
I admit that FreeNAS is being the most hardest thing I ever learned and that I still have many issues to resolve as it was a pain in the ass to learn how to setup Plex and I can't even do anything with the cloud plugin that some are even giving customized methods of doing it, I still have a lot of trouble remembering all the names that are given here to the things that are called different on linux or windows.
Right now looks like my 2 USBs for the boot pool broke and I can't seem to find a solution. Someone had told me to reinstall FreeNAS on another USBs and just import the pools, but for some reason that doesn't work for me, I go to the storage - pool - add - import but on the pop up menu it doesn't appear any pool to import even though all the disks are detected, I think I am missing something but this people over here like to think that you are a fool because you can't find something that they see so simple by your self.
I am starting to get annoyed by the arrogant way many behave over here. I am willing to give all the information needed if I have it, I am not knowledge stingy but this people here are.
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