Old Poweredge 2950 vs Dell inspiron i7547-3020slv

[efigalaxie 2]

I have been running Emby server on an old Poweredge 2950 for the last year. I bought a cheap laptop to replace it. My media is on 5 NAS devices. The cpu in the 2950 is a 5000 series Xeon. There is 4gb memory. I can't see any negatives to replacing the old server hardware with the laptop. I got te laptop dirt cheap because the digitizer for the touch screen is busted, but the display functions. In fact, the bottleneck on the laptop is the terribly slow had drive. 

 

Any recommendations??

[tman 47]

Wow. The old PE2950 is a power sucking beast that will produce a lot of heat and noise, but with those Xeon's, it's still quite powerful. A bit more memory wouldn't go amiss, but it uses FB DIMMS which are pretty expensive. The laptop will be a lot more eco friendly, but personally, I wouldn't run any 'server' apps on it. You could put an SSD in it, but you're still very limited. Transcoding would almost certainly be a non-starter too - laptop CPU's are generally much weaker than desktop versions. Couldn't help noticing you say you have '5' NAS devices! Maybe time for some consolidation? You could buy a PC case, modern motherboard, CPU and RAM - put all the disks in one case and still have a pretty low powered Emby 'server' solution for not much outlay.

[efigalaxie 2]

They are all consumer NAS units, not PCs. The NAS units are ALL Raid1. 12TB mirrored - or 24TB not mirrored. Two LG units, Two WD units. One DLink unit. Actually, I have another 2TB/4TB WD unit that I am not using yet. Then I also have everything backed up to an entirely separate set of external USB 3.0 Seagate drives.

 

I looked at a couple of the CPU comparison sites and both seemed to think the i5 would stomp the older xeon. Plus, the i5 has the 4400hd integrated gpu which brings with it, quicksync. All my stuff is mp4/h264. Most of my stuff will play that natively.

[efigalaxie 2]

I also have a Quad core equipped i5 machine with 8gb memory. Something very close to this......  http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16883155851&nm_mc=KNC-GoogleAdwords-PC&cm_mmc=KNC-GoogleAdwords-PC-_-pla-_-All-in-One+PCs-_-N82E16883155851&gclid=CIyU766i1c0CFdgSgQodtRkLxA&gclsrc=aw.ds