Thinkpads Forum

Hello,

I am looking for opinions on making a ThinkStation S20 into a server. Is it worth while? My biggest thing is hard drive space in RAID, a powerful CPU and RAM. I believe is is a good system for this under $500 roughly but it seemed like I am wasting the video card functionality and physical space with the extra long card slots.

Here is what I am looking at currently:

http://www.ebay.ca/itm/Lenovo-ThinkStat ... 3388aa9c16

It will certainly work. I use a similar ThinkServer TS130 at home (it seem that the E30 and TS130 are quite similar). The TS130 uses onboard video. The only shortcoming with the TS130's is they officially only support two internal drives. However, there is certainly room and connectors for four. I'm using three right now, one SSD for boot and mirrored 1.5TB drives for data storage. So far, so good.

The TS130 are very inexpensive, too. New or used. Very small and light, extremely quiet -- hard to tell it's on!

The S20 you linked is a very nice workstation. It should serve just fine as a server in pinch. Are you planning on adding a PCIe RAID card?