Take the 2-minute tour ×

I have an HP Proliant ML115 (quadcore Opteron 1216 2.4GH/2.5GB RAM) gathering dust in my study. It runs Windows 2008 pretty well - I used to use it as an environment for playing with new software and technology as a general purpose storage box and svn server. Most of my stuff now runs in VMs on a MacPro and/or in the cloud so this box is just dead space at the moment. I'm not sure what to do with it:

Option 1
Beef it up and use it as a home media/file server.

Option 2
Beef it up, add a decent graphics card and use it as a gaming rig and/or workstation and/or media centre.

Option 3 Scrap it on the grounds that its EOL.

I would appreciate your thoughts on the relative merits and/or feasibility of doing all or any of the above.

share|improve this question
Please take a moment to read our FAQ. –  John Gardeniers Mar 7 '12 at 1:20
Ok. The hardware is currently in a home office and I may well continue to use it for work (I'm a developer) purposes ... :-/ –  5arx Mar 7 '12 at 1:23
add comment

migrated from serverfault.com Oct 12 '12 at 0:02


2 Answers

up vote 3 down vote accepted

Ultimately, it's up to you. Depending on the storage and RAID configuration you could very well use it as a home media server - although I believe the power draw could be quite high compared to something alongside a HP Microserver. Take a look at FreeNAS and see if that's any good.

I've not tried putting a graphics card inside a server, there's no reason it shoudln't work but you may have issues with the drivers depending on Operating System.

If you do choose to scrap it or get rid of it, see if there are any local charities or projects in your area. Could list it on eBay or some of the selling sites like Gumtree or Craigslist, but it as pickup only and see if you get anyone interested.

share|improve this answer
add comment

give it to some local kid, who could do with the help?

share|improve this answer
add comment

Your Answer


