Wanting to set up a server.

[Voltron]

I've been looking around at servers recently and it came to my attention that I must have one! :clap: Ill use it to host Mp3's, do back-ups, mess with around with FTP and such. Pretty much just a toy play with/learn from.

Price range is aroud 300$.

I been doing allot of browsing on ebay and seen quite a few in my price range. Like the Dell Poweredge. Can get one with dual P3 700's, 3-5 9/18gig Scsi hot swap drives, 512-1gig memory. I know it's a dual P3 system but how well will it be able to perform?

I also seen that Dell is having a sale on their servers @ dell.com. Can get one with a Celeron 2.53/533, 256 of DDR2, 40 gig SATA for 230$

Would the Celeron one out perform the Dual P3's?

If you guys know of any other servers, let me know. A Dual AMD system would be cool to but I havent found any of them.

[Slackfumasta]

For filesharing, the processor won't make that much of a difference. What you want is bandwidth and storage and drive speed. For that purpose, I'd go with the Dell Poweredge 420SC off their website that you mentioned, but only because they are having a quad-upgrade sale on the drives for those machines, so you'll get a 160 GB SATA drive for the same price.

The dual P3 might have good drive performance though, depending on the drives. A few SCSI drives with a hardware RAID controller would be pretty sweet for a home server. If that's what you can get on ebay for a couple hundred dollars, that might be a good option. I hate buying used computers though, you never know when it's going to go belly up, especially if it was heavily used.

[David]

If its mostly file serving then most PCs will handle it. The P3 will have more cache at its disposal so may edge out the Celeron in terms of performance. Also you have two so... Im not sure.

[Carbon]

I'm still using a PII 350 as a server in my house :D

[PLOBBY]

I just use a pII 350 mhz for my smoothwall, and for my file/mp3 server i use a athlon 650 mhz with only 128 mb of ram at the moment. I need to go out and buy a little more, just to make it run a little smoother, but thats aboout it. Nothing fancy and it works. Im lacking hard drive space at the moment for my file server at the moment, but later this month i should have another 250 gb hard drive hooked to it.