Fished this monster out of a dumpster a few years back at work and always knew I’d probably do something with it, heard they make great gaming PCs but it’s so freaking loud I never even entertained that possibility.
it has 16x2.5" sata hdd bays, still has the iLO details and serial number card which I hear is uncommon for 2nd hand servers, hardware raid card because of the extra 8 bays and external scsi card.
my self hosting journy only started a few weeks back with a 2 bay synology nas and pi-hole (technically a few years with jellyfin on my main pc but you know …) so simple suggestions, preferably 100% local because I’m behind a CGNAT without ipv6 and it looks like a lot of work to deal with.
and if anyone knows what software is used on the SD slot and internal usb key, if anything, that would be great :) I’m assuming license keys for software or something equally unimportant because I’ve installed Proxmox to mess around with and it didn’t need them.
The internal usb and SD card slot are just there in case you want to boot from usb or SD.
You can install your OS to them and then all of your HDDs can be used for storage instead of losing capacity to an OS partition.
Back in the day, we would look for the newest SmartStart CD to install from, but it’s no longer possible to get from official channels. Also they’re only useful for installing the supported operating systems.
The G7 knows the thermal profile of most HP hardware of it’s generation and runs the fans at the appropriate speed for proper cooling for known hardware, but sticking anything 3rd party (or just newer) in there will ramp it up to max cooling mode for thermal protection. It’s a pain.