Need advice Old Server (X3400 M2)

I have a old IBM Server my brother brought home. It’s a IBM X3400 M2 7837. I bought a NVME pcie card to act as the temporary drive. It has 4 SAS Hotswap bays. What is the fastest and best way to configure this? Should I use RAID? Should I pop in 4 5 TB SAS Drives? I never played with servers and I want to configure to get the fastest and most plots. I loaded Ubuntu Server with a GUI because it wouldn’t accept my Windows 2016 Database software. It also has expandable 5.25 slots for more hardware.

Thanks!

This is a very old machine… I don’t think you can squeeze out much of this old machine…
I think you can get 8 till 12 plots a day with a SSD!

This will be SAS drive with 7k rpm… If you really want to plot on HDDs, then you should buy 15K rpm SAS drives, which are mostly smaller drives, and put all in a raid 0 (stripe).

Throw it away and get you a more powerful and energy saving plotting machine.

That’s what I was thinking. I bought a Samsung 1tb nvme and a PCEI 16x card for it. That way I use the SSD to plot and I could get more up to date SAS hardware. Chia is suppose to be more green. I was also thinking about using it with Filecoin. Idk what would work better. I do realize the server is older than Bitcoin, but Chia is suppose to be more green. So I want to try it before I trash it. My NVME SSD will be here tommrow. I also thought about buying a JBOD for Chia. I just want to get ahead in the Crypto game. It’s basically a Money Printer. My goal is to have a ASIC miner, HDD miner, and a Helium miner. I may just need to get better hardware. I have a desktop I can use the NVME if the server fails.

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Chia is supposed to be more green because they assume you are using your existing resource, not buying extra rigs. And since it’s an old machine it would use tons of electricity and produce lots of heat and noise. A E5v1/v2 platform would perform multiple times faster and you pay half of the power bill. If you are into server world, you can start with E5v1/v2 platform like R620 or R720, or Supermicro X9 series.

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Chia is considered “green” because it was designed upon the basis that corporations or server farms would utilize unused resources for Chia as opposed to leaving them under utilized. The Chia team knew that eventually, small farmers would get in but never gave that much thought (and still don’t). Only the bigger players in the system would succeed per the way it is designed (and like I said, the big players would still be spare resources on a corporate level).

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