They have a secondary motherboard that hosts the Slot CPUs, 4 single core P3 Xeons. I also have the Dell equivalent model but it has a bum mainboard.

With those 90’s systems, to get Windows NT to use more than 1 core, you have to get the appropriate Windows version that actually supports them.

Now you can simply upgrade from a 1 to a 32 core CPU and Windows and Linux will pick up the difference and run with it.

In the NT 3.5 and 4 days, you actually had to either do a full reinstall or swap out several parts of the Kernel to get it to work.

Downgrading took the same effort as a multicore windows Kernel ran really badly on a single core system.

As for the Sun Fires, the two models I mentioned tend to be highly available on Ebay in the 100-200 range and are very different inside than an X86 system. You can go for 400 or higher series to get even more difference, but getting a complete one of those can be a challenge.

And yes, the software used on some of these older systems was a challenge in itself, but they aren’t really special, they are pretty much like having different vendors RGB controller softwares on your system, a nuisance that you should try to get past.

For instance, the IBM 5000 series raid cards were simply LSI cards with an IBM branded firmware.

The first thing most people do is put the actual LSI firmware on them so they run decently.

Oh, I get it. But a baseline HP Proliant from that era is just an x86 system barely different from a desktop today but worse/slower/more power hungry in every respect.

For history and “how things changed”, go for something like a Sun Fire system from the mid 2000’s (280R or V240 are relatively easy and cheap to get and are actually different) or a Proliant from the mid to late 90’s (I have a functioning Compaq Proliant 7000 which is HUGE and a puzzlebox inside).

x86 computers haven’t changed much at all in the past 20 years and you need to go into the rarer models (like blade systems) to see an actual deviation from the basic PC alike form factor we’ve been using for the past 20 years and unique approaches to storage and performance.

For self hosting, just use something more recent that falls within your priceclass (usually 5-6 years old becomes highly affordable). Even a Pi is going to trounce a system that old and actually has a different form factor.

You should replace that thing with something more modern. I had a 5000p chipset system someone gave me with dual quad cores and an assload of ram.

The shitty box idled over 400W. I went as far as getting low power ram and the newest CPU it would support that also supported frequency and power scaling and it still used over 400W on idle.

This while I had a Xeon E5 box that was only a few years younger that uses more in the neighborhood of 50W on idle and utterly decimates the 5000 series box in CPU performance.

You’re probably better of fetching some old Ryzen 1800x system of ebay for higher performance and leagues lower power consumption.

As for the raid, don’t use it. Hardware raid has always been shit and in modern Linux and Windows is as good as completely depricated.