At the beginning of February the company decided to swap out 8 old HP machines for newer models for the office workers. They all got swapped out and placed in storage for the following months just in case someone was missing any files from the old machines.

Fast forward to the middle of June when the HP 8200 Elite PCs became ready to be thrown away, donated or sold. The PCs all have the same configuration(i5-2400, 4gb DDR3, 250gb HDD, 1Gbit NIC) just 2 different case designs.

After wiping all the drives in preparation fur this event, I tested one of the compact ones to see what and if it would still be usable. Turns out, the CPU, an i5-2400 is clocked at 3.1GHz base and will and does turbo up to 3.4GHz. Under a stress test the system was very quiet and never exceeded 75°C on the CPU. With the addition of RAM and Linux it changed from an old office machine that could barely run Windows anymore in to a still very capable Desktop PC. That's when the idea struck!

I could use one of these machines as a testing and experimenting machine. It still has enough compute power and speed to perform any modern server duties so I decided that I will keep one exactly for this purpose. Thus this project was born.

The initial plan was to fill one of the small units with as many HDDs as possible, some multi-NIC network cards and we would be off to the races. I could test various RAID, Filesystems and network configurations at the same time. 

The initial plan and physical inspecion lead to believe that the small form factor machine could take up to 10 2.5-inch HDDs, 1 PCIe 1x and 2 PCIe 16x cards, and 1 PCI card. Not to shabby...but after some power draw math it was quite clear that the 240w PSU wouldn't allow such a thing. Based on most conservative PSU calculators online even the current setup was to much for this PSU. Knowing that those wattage calculators are very conservative I ran my own calculations on a spreadsheet and with everything plugged in and working I was looking at about 250 to 260w power draw with 8 2.5-inch drives and the PCI SATA controller. This was without the extra wattage needed for the spinup of the HDDs. Very much at and past the limit of what that PSU can safely handle. 

At the end of the day the PSU played the biggest role in going for the Microtower case as that came with a much more powerfull 320w PSU. 

The downside of the Microtower is that the PCIe configuration is slightly different. I can't plug 2 full length PCIe cards in anymore, and one of the ports is replaced for a 1x port. HP basically lying in their technical documentation compared to the physical machines. Still there are 1x PCIe network cards available, so everything would still work. Also with the bigger case, 3.5-inch HDDs are now an option.