Home Server Ideas (..it's goint to get Nerdy in here...)

[Kevris]

So I've just pulled the trigger on pretty decent Supermicro server from EBay, 2x L5520 CPU's, 40GB RAM, decent LSI Raid controller, 12 drive bays. This will be upgrading my current (super old) Opteron 1214/8GB server. I'll have 2x 250GB 7.2k SATA drives mirrored with the server's onboard controller for my OS and 8x 1TB 7.2k SATA drives for data driven by the LSI controller, set in RAID-5 with an online spare.

As it stands I have a nice AD domain, roaming profiles, redirected folders. I've been using the old server as a data vault, media server, Minecraft server, WSUS server, WDS server and test platform for me to play around with new tech before I implement it at my office.

As I'm going from 2 cores/2 threads and 8GB of RAM to 8 cores/16 threads and 40GB RAM I'm going to have a TON more horsepower to play around with.

The backbone in the house is 1GB on some crappy unmanaged switches (I'll swap that for better ones when I find some on the cheap). The endpoints are used for gaming, media streaming, normal home computing stuff.

Give me some ideas to suck up some of this extra horsepower, my fellow nerds!