Hey everybody! First off, just wanna thank a lot of you guys for help over the years. The threads and forums on this site has helped me numerous times in the past. Whether it be with PPC mac's or jailbreaking, but now I wanted to post cuz I'm having a bit of trouble. The other day I picked up a Xserve 1,1 with two Xeon 5130 CPUs, 8GB of RAM, no hard drives (which I didn't expect there to be since it's a retired server) and it's got a eSATA expansion card. Now, I'm sure there's a few threads about the Xserves, but I'm on slow internet and a lot of stuff doesn't load. If I ask a question that's already been answered in another thread, please link the thread for me 
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I wanna use the server as a data storage/cloud storage machine. I realize there's cheaper and more efficient options, but I want to work with what I have and I want to learn as I go. Besides, the machine was $25, can't really beat that price. My main question is what versions of OS X can be installed on an Xserve 1,1? There's a lot of different answers online, nobody seems to know. As of now, the server is completely stock without upgrades so I wanna know what OS X version can be installed on that. My next question is what upgrades can I do? Obviously RAM and hard drives, but what CPUs and GPU are supported by the Xserve 1,1 firmware? I know a GPU ain't important, but would be nice to use it as a video render server in it's downtime. In a lot of forum posts, I see people mentioning the Xserve 1,1 basicallybeing a Mac Pro 1,1. Which is fine, except the Mac Pro seems to have more upgrades that aren't viable to the Xserve. So please only mention upgrades available for the Xserve
Next, modding. Can the firmware be upgraded to enable a new-ish version of OS X? I know the Mac Pro can be, but the Xserve seems to be a grey area. People say it can be done but won't say how.
Another thing is the eSATA card. It was already installed in my Xserve, so might as well use it. I know eSATA was a flop, but it had it's fair share in external drives. I plan to rack mount this system, are there any rack mountable eSATA systems? Something like a hard drive array but with eSATA as the communication interface? I know there's Ethernet solutions, but I rather use the card already in the system. If I can use eSATA external drives, what software could I use to manage the data and allow the Xserve/external drives to be used as a NAS?
The rack mountable eSATA drives isn't a must, if there isn't a rack mountable solution then I'll just use consumer external drives.
Hopefully this makes sense, I'm out and about right now and my focus isn't entirely dedicated to typing right now lol
. I wanna use the server as a data storage/cloud storage machine. I realize there's cheaper and more efficient options, but I want to work with what I have and I want to learn as I go. Besides, the machine was $25, can't really beat that price. My main question is what versions of OS X can be installed on an Xserve 1,1? There's a lot of different answers online, nobody seems to know. As of now, the server is completely stock without upgrades so I wanna know what OS X version can be installed on that. My next question is what upgrades can I do? Obviously RAM and hard drives, but what CPUs and GPU are supported by the Xserve 1,1 firmware? I know a GPU ain't important, but would be nice to use it as a video render server in it's downtime. In a lot of forum posts, I see people mentioning the Xserve 1,1 basicallybeing a Mac Pro 1,1. Which is fine, except the Mac Pro seems to have more upgrades that aren't viable to the Xserve. So please only mention upgrades available for the Xserve
Next, modding. Can the firmware be upgraded to enable a new-ish version of OS X? I know the Mac Pro can be, but the Xserve seems to be a grey area. People say it can be done but won't say how.
Another thing is the eSATA card. It was already installed in my Xserve, so might as well use it. I know eSATA was a flop, but it had it's fair share in external drives. I plan to rack mount this system, are there any rack mountable eSATA systems? Something like a hard drive array but with eSATA as the communication interface? I know there's Ethernet solutions, but I rather use the card already in the system. If I can use eSATA external drives, what software could I use to manage the data and allow the Xserve/external drives to be used as a NAS?
The rack mountable eSATA drives isn't a must, if there isn't a rack mountable solution then I'll just use consumer external drives.
Hopefully this makes sense, I'm out and about right now and my focus isn't entirely dedicated to typing right now lol
