[Swlug] Dual system case or......

[Matt Moore]

On 06/05/2025 22:31, Dave via Swlug wrote:
> Hi all!
> I'm going to be on the market soon for new/used gear for my Plex
> Server, and was wondering if any other members could throw some input?
> I was originally looking at downsizing the case it is currently in
> which is a MozartTx beast, and it currently houses 2 servers in the
> case, the main Plex server is am ageing i7 3770 with 16Gb RAM and a
> Quadro k2200 GPU, and the second (currently not used server) i3 3240T,
> 8Gb RAM and 1Tb Drive.
> My original idea was to get a new case which can house a 5 bay Icy Box,
> and havw spacw to add more drives as I fill the current 5 up.
>
> The other idea is to just upgrade what I currently have with a later i7
> say the 7700 or 8800 with 16 or 32Gb DDR4 RAM, especially as eBay is
> getting an influx of older parts as users rush to attempt to upgrade
> their perfectly good CPU etc for Windows 11.
> So what are others thoughts on which direction to take.
>
> Cheers in advance.....


Hi Dave,

Here's a few random thoughts based my experience.  You've not really 
given a budget or anything like that, so I'm just going to throw out 
some idea.

I did look into your current case, which I'd never heard of. It's a 
pretty cool and pretty bonkers beast.  Upgrading that, assuming you're 
happy with it taking up a lot of space, would be a sensible way 
forward.  Less hassle.  No massive case to get rid of.  As you rightly 
note, there's often cheap stuff up on ebay or similar.

My current home server is a mini-ITX based system with a reasonable 
amount of fancy bits, eg IPMI, 10gb network and some other bits.  I 
actually got a new case to replace my current mini-ITX case.  Turns out 
that cases haven't changed much (whoda thunk?) and my previous case was 
actually perfect for my needs.  I really like using a mini-ITX server as 
it doesn't take up much space and they're generally pretty low power.  
mATX might also be fine, but is a chunk bigger.

Final option, which is a bit left field, but I really like would be to 
put together a k8s cluster with some kind of sbc.  The obvious and easy 
one would probably be to use raspberry pis. There's lots of guides and 
lots of cases and the like for it. I've done one with rpis and it's a 
great home server.  It's fairly cheap, low power and you can easily add 
more power by just buying a new node.

Hope that's some food for thought

Cheers,

Matt