Xserve at Home

[ChrisFerri]

A little around a year ago I picked up a used Xserve on eBay. For me I've been using it as a media server. Using it for Handbreak, holding all of my iTunes content and distributing it through AppleTV and whatnot.

I was curious if anyone else has one at home and what they use it for and what you do with it.

Here a snap shot of what I've got in mine.

 

[onecajun]

Home Xserve

I have 2 using them for the same, great machines serving up all my ripped movies and tv shows.

 

[jigzat]

I'm actually planing to do the same, I'm moving to a new house and I installed structured wiring and a rack, and I'm searching for a good rackmount server to handle a RAID for time machine and movie streaming and also hosting a website for my project (nothing fancy). I'm currently using a Dell Optiplex 755 with FreeBSD as my server and that is my concern. I could use Mavericks for most things even installing a web sever but I would love to have the choice of installing FreeBSD or any GNU distro but it appears it is not posible a this time.

How is your setup.

 

[irnchriz]

I am in the process of replacing four of these at a clients. I was thinking of making one good unit from the four of them. These are all the first intel units but four out of the eight RAID controller cards are starting to fail and we have no spare drives left (had 5 spare drives which we bought when they got the units)

What is the life of these servers? these must be at least 6 years old so I am thinking that I might be better off just getting a decent NAS to hold my media files.

 

[rlkarren]

Those Xserves are power hogs. I have 5 of them at work and would never use them at home because they use so much power.

I can understand "playing" with it and maybe learning some things, but I think if you wanted a more permanent solution, you would be better served with a NAS or an older Mac Mini, (because it will be inexpensive).

 

[jigzat]

I read somewhere that the 2009 version has an extra slot for an SSD and that would leave 3 available SATA/SAS slots for a RAID. I assume it will eat up less power and will spare the extra power usage of a separate RAID. Although the mini has half the power needs of the Xserve the 2009 has 4 cores vs 2 and support up to 96GB of ram which might be killer for a house, but in my case I will have 5 HD IP cameras recording all day plus the movie music streaming and the application server and Time Machine, I might end up needing two minis for all this and the cost would be too high. Am I talking trash?