[talk] When is hardware too old?

[Warner Losh]

When is hardware too old? I don't know... I just bought a hard disk card
for my 35-year-old DEC Rainbow-100...

Warner


On Thu, Oct 10, 2019 at 2:02 PM Brian Gupta <brian.gupta at gmail.com> wrote:

> R710s and above are still decent machines. You can upgrade parts and
> get a lot of cores and RAM. The R720 can be upgraded to 24 cores and
> 1.5TB RAM. They are datacenter-centric so are noisy especially when
> powering on or running at load. However, loudness-wise an aquarium
> that has a 6 inch waterfall will be louder. (I have a 720xd running
> stress tests and it's not too bad. Barely bothersome from 10-15 ft
> away.) It's hard to beat these machines for bang for the buck.
> However, I probably wouldn't want to keep one permanently running in
> my apartment, unless I had a 19" rack setup and am ok with a bit of
> heat/noise, and a likely noticeable bump in my AC bill.
>
> There is a huge aftermarket for these servers and their parts, that
> will keep them in production use for many years to come, so I think
> you had a nice score.
>
> - Brian Gupta
>
> On Thu, Oct 10, 2019 at 12:18 AM Sujit K M <kmsujit at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> >
> > On Thu, Oct 10, 2019, 6:31 AM Charles Sprickman <spork at bway.net> wrote:
> >>
> >> Hi all,
> >>
> >> Some home lab advice…? So I’ve been gifted an old Dell R-720. It’s from
> 2012 or so, pretty old.
> >>
> >> It has:
> >>
> >> 2 CPUs - Intel Xeon CPU E5-2609 0 @ 2.40GHz, 4 cores (8
> w/hyperthreading)
> >> 48 GB RAM - DDR3 DIMM 1066MHz (6 x 8GB)
> >> PERC 710 mini RAID controller w/512MB RAM and battery backup
> >> 4 Broadcom 1Gb/s NICs
> >> 600 GB Seagate 15K 3.5” drive x 5 (2 are showing errors, may or may not
> be bad)
> >> iDRAC 7 (no enterprise license)
> >>
> >> It all seems to be in working order, other than two possibly bad drives.
> >>
> >> So… I have three options:
> >>
> >> - recycle
> >> - give away
> >> - use for some VMs
> >> - sell (maybe $300 if I’m lucky and go local w/craigslist?)
> >>
> >> Now every now and then I find a need to spin up some weird linux distro
> or some other testing that I don’t really want to run in vmware on my
> desktop or laptop because it’s going to be around for a few weeks/months.
> My home “server” is an older HP and I try not to use it for experiments,
> plus it only has 16GB of RAM.
> >>
> >> I can tell this was originally used for a bunch of virtual machines,
> and if it can handle 6 instances of Windows Server 2012, then a few *BSD
> and Linux installs are going to do OK. The “iDRAC” is on a trial enterprise
> license and it’s pretty nice - remote BIOS updates, java-less & flash-less
> remote KVM, there’s an SD slot to boot off of, it’s all pretty nice, even
> “luxurious” for home use. I’d run the freebie vmware hypervisor just so I
> could move VMs between this box and my desktop w/o much fuss.
> >>
> >> What I’d spend money on:
> >>
> >> - bootleg iDRAC enterprise key ($30 on ebay)
> >> - 2 or more large/cheap SSDs for VMs (I’d keep two of the existing
> drives for the OS - about $130 x2)
> >>
> >> This is all much cheaper than introducing a new server.
> >
> >
> > Was in a similar position. Would keep a gifted free hardware to hack and
> do personal work when needed.
> >
> >> Thoughts?
> >>
> >> Thanks,
> >>
> >> Charles
> >> _______________________________________________
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> >
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