A week ago, I made a Craigslist purchase of a Dell OptiPlex 7040 that I was planning to turn into a second server, a local home server this time instead of a web server (more on this coming soon). The day after I got the computer from the seller on Craigslist, I was scrolling through r/homelab on Reddit (a much better place than r/analog) and decided to share what I’d recent gotten and ask if there was anything specific that I should try with it. After giving some details on the system, one Redditor told me that they had some DDR4 RAM sticks that they’d be willing to send me so that I could upgrade the RAM without having to spend any money. Of course, I accepted. The next day, I was send a USPS tracking number, and four days later, this morning, I went to pick up my package that I thought I’d be able to stick in my hoodie pocket for my walk home in the rain…
The post office worker comes to the window carrying a huge box, and when they hand it to me, to my surprise, it’s nearly 30 pounds. After checking the name of the package and insuring that it was infact mine, I trekked back home trying to figure out what the hell I was carrying.
I’m excitedly surprised at what I saw when I opened the box. My new friend from Reddit not only sent me the two 8-gigabyte RAM sticks that they said they would, but two additional sticks. But there was something else in the box as well… TWO COMPUTERS!
Along with the RAM stick was a Dell OptiPlex 7050 Micro and, underneath that, a Dell OptiPlex 7080 SFF. WHAT?! They sent me two computers?! Before I sent them a message thanking them for what I just received, I had to open up both of these to see what was inside them.
The 7050 Micro had a 500-gigabyte 5400-RPM SATA hard disk drive inside. Underneath that was also a 512-gigabyte M.2 SATA solid state drive and a Wi-Fi card, and off to the side of that under the system fan was 16-gigabytes of DDR4 RAM. After getting it booted up, I discovered that there is also an Intel Core i7-6700 CPU. This is not a baby Micro computer.
The big(ger) boy 7080 SFF has a 1-terabyte 7200-RPM SATA hard disk drive inside. Underneath that, this one had an M.2 NVME solid state drive installed and 64-gigabytes of DDR4 RAM. I’ve never had this much RAM in any computer I’ve ever owned. After booting up this one, I found out that there is an Intel Core i7-10700 CPU. Again, some power stuff. Unfortunately, USPS didn’t take care of this package and the 7080 was dented, which resulted in potential mechanical damage to the hard drive as neither the BIOS or any operating system I installed recognizes it, and it’s making weird noises. That was disappointing because I was really ready to start digging to this one and playing with it. I still can since I’ll be installing whatever operating system I choose on the NVME drive, but I want to have a second drive in there for all of the storage stuff.
All in all, this was a very nice surprise today. I had planned to pick up the RAM from the post office, come home and install it, and spend the rest of the day relaxing a bit. But instead, I spent the majority of the afternoon getting two new computers setup the best I could with what I had in preperation to expand my server setup. Over the past few years, I have been wanting to buy, or build as of recent, a small NAS that I could keep at a friend’s house as an off-site backup of my photography work hard drive. I’m thinking that I could do that with one of these, but I haven’t gotten that far in the planning yet. I’ve also thought about retiring the HP Compaq D5750 that I have hosting Nextcloud and this (and other) website and potential save on some electricity. But with these computers being smaller and only allowing for one 3.5-inch HDD, that wouldn’t work well with how I have this server set up (a system SSD, two hard drives configured in RAID 1, and a third hard drive as a network share drive). But I’ll figure out all of that over time.
So, I guess I’m officially addicted to something new alongside creating music and photographing women; two things that I haven’t done much of since my move. But I’ve come full circle being that “computers” is the first thing I had an interest in around the age of 11-12 years old. So I’ll be learning and implimenting this into my life now.