At the moment I have 3 operational mid tower PC's and laptop (Thinkpad w500). I also have a hybrid mid tower running a SPARC motherboard (from a SunBlade 1500). I tossed the SPARC system together several years back when I was working daily with Solaris 8 at work.
Given I have no use for the sparc box anymore, I'll likely be removing this motherboard and selling it on EBAY. I have a spare core2duo motherboard with (I think 8GB of memory) and an AMD HD 6000 series graphics card which I'll likely install into this system so it can be re-allocated as a home theater PC (perhaps running SteamOS or something similar).
As for the details of the operational stable:
My Lenovo Thinkpad W500 laptop is running Linux Mint 17.2 KDE. It has 8GB of memory, a 128GB primary SSD, and for expanded storage I swapped out the DVD drive for a hard drive caddy containing a 500GB WD Scorpio black. Thinking about pulling this drive and replacing it with a 250GB SSD or something similar. At least then the laptop would have no moving parts (sans the cooling fan).
My primary workstation is a nice refurbished HP Z210 workstation running Windows 10. It has a server class motherboard , quad core XEON with hyperthreading, 8 GB of ECC memory, and an AMD R7 265 Graphics card. It's basically a poor man's i7 gamer box. The primary drive is a 128GB SSD and I have 2 old 150GB WD raptors running in a raid stripe.
Ya I know there is no redundancy, and if I lose a single drive everything is gone, but this storage array is only storing downloaded game content. So, there is nothing on it which cannot be reproduced. When I configured the array, I chose speed over integrity. This is a very fast and nearly silent gaming rig. I also use it for occasional virtualization (Vmware player and virtualbox).
Next up is my Linux box. It's running an old Gigabyte EP45-UD3R motherboard with a slightly overclocked core 2 quad CPU, 12GB of memory, and an old Nvidia graphics card. To reduce energy usage, I will likely dial this box back to stock settings (It's overclocked because it used to be my gaming rig). The primary storage drive is a 7200 rpm 160GB laptop drive with Linux Mint 17.3 KDE installed. For additional storage I have added two 500GB WD blue drives, which are configured for storage integrity as a ZFS RAID mirror. This system (along with my laptop) will primarily be used for OpenIndiana (and illumos) systems documentation development (A.K.A content creation). I will also be using it as a virtualization system (VMware, Virtualbox, and KVM).
Finally there is the system I have built up as my primary storage server. It's an old core 2 duo motherboard with only a couple of Gigs of memory. Primary storage is a 300 GB hard drive (which is overkill really...but what else am I going to do with it?). Secondary storage consists of 2 brand new 1TB WD RE 7200 rpm nearline SAS drives. The drives are running off an old LSI hardware RAID controller configured as a simple host bus adapter (IT mode I guess?). The sole purpose of the card is to support the operation of the SAS drives as data integrity will be the sole responsibility of ZFS.
This system will be running OpenIndiana Hipster with a text mode console (no GUI). Hipster makes for a great home NAS system as ZFS is native to OpenIndiana (due to it's OpenSolaris roots). No it doesn't have ECC memory.....but I'm not going to let that stop me.
That's it for now.....
Michael
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