I would either if the bottom one runs put at least another hdd since theres only one which isnt good for reliability. If the original poster doesnt want to try to figure out what hdds to get they should just spend at least $300 and get a nice refurbished unit. Like this r610 https://www.amazon.com/PowerEdge-R610-2-67Ghz-Certified-Refurbished/dp/B00HDAGDLK
$100 might only get you either replacement parts or low quality upgrade parts. Save yourself and spend at least $200 more. https://www.amazon.com/PowerEdge-R610-2-67Ghz-Certified-Refurbished/dp/B00HDAGDLK that would be better than that one hdd dell server! Thats the one i have.
The good backups do more than just keep the computers, computing. They also help ensure your gear gets smooth and consistent power, versus the (depending on where you live) wildly fluctuating voltages and frequency changes that some of us deal with.
A good test to see if you need to worry about this, would be to see if a cheap LED bulb that you normally use everyday lasts more than a month. If so, then you're probably good. Where I live, in Houston, even good GE LED bulbs wouldn't last a month. I installed a whole home surge protector, and haven't replaced one since (2.5 years) and we have about 40 of them in the house.
Even with that, I still have all of my computers, security, networking, wifi, cameras and servers running from a beefy APC UPS.
I have these in my garage over where I store paint and compressed gas and above my UPS and at the top of my rack
I actually considered refurbups.com for getting ups support, but I just bit the bullet and bought 2 ups backups (1500 each, but from different companies 1 and 2), to support my servers. The refurbups prices weren't compelling enough to consider it. They were basically the same as new at my level. I imagine the 3k+ levels are bigger discounts, but I'm not really seeing much if any discounts below that.
On a side note, still looking for a way to enable nVIDIA's CUDA H.264 encoder (nvcuvenc) in Linux. You can currently get it working in Windows 10 by using this tutorial. Quite interested in seeing how well it would work on a compute card (Tesla K10), compared to the crappy NVENC encoder that they shipped with it (Kepler's NVENC encoder). Also heard that the NVENC encoder might not even work in ESXi, so rip that wasted die space. Gotta make things work somehow...
this is also going to affect the bandwidth of the card, depending on what you are connecting to it. but yea there are 1x to 16x cables you can get, like these
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Back in the day when switches were too rich for me, a single crossover ethernet cable was enough to create a lan between two PCs. Meaning a regular cable would not work.
Is that the case today? I can't imagine much has changed, so I would think so.
A 1gbe switch is a bit cheaper now
https://www.amazon.com/NETGEAR-Gigabit-Ethernet-Unmanaged-1000Mbps/dp/B00KFD0SMC