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Unixsurplus. Just like with cars, the cost savings of buying used are difficult to beat. Who cares if the hardware is a few years old if you're getting it 90% o
by anonym29 4y ago
Unixsurplus. Just like with cars, the cost savings of buying used are difficult to beat. Who cares if the hardware is a few years old if you're getting it 90% off original MSRP?
As an example, visiting the site now, first thing I see is a box with 2x E5-2667 v2 (8c,16t, 3.3ghz base clock, 22nm). These were $2300 each when new. It also comes with 128 GB RAM, case, PSU, 1U rail kit, and two 500 GB SATA SSD's to partially fill it's 10 caddies.
The entire thing is $260 + $65 shipping. You can't even get 16c/32t of 3.3ghz compute alone for that price these days, let alone a whole bootable system.
This entire system is about 7% of the price of those two CPU's when new, so you're getting at least 93% off MSRP there (in reality, higher, after subtracting the cost of the RAM, case/chassis, PSU, disks, etc).
Sure, 4x R5 5500 does give you a passmark of around 76k compared to the 24k you're going to get with 2 of those xeons, but then again, you couldn't even buy four of those R5 5500 CPUs alone (let alone 4 cases, mobos, PSU's, coolers, HDDs, RAM, etc) for the cost of that system on Unixsurplus.
I am not affiliated with Unixsurplus and don't personally know anyone who is, but man do I love their store. It's the technology hardware implementation of "one person's trash is another person's treasure"
- josh_p 4y agoWhat do you install on one those? Can you link a guide for setting one of these up?
- anonym29 4y agoProbably Debian, but it depends on the workload. I'm not sure why you'd need a guide to "setting up" a complete, prebuilt 1U server or what it would even consist of. "Plug in the power cable and press the power button, then use your USB keyboard and USB mouse to get into the BIOS, where you rearrange the boot order to select from your USB flash drive"? Same as any other prebuilt computer. Unless I'm misunderstanding the question somehow?
- aprdm 4y agoPXE Boot over the network seems like a better way, no ?
- miketery 4y agoAny harm in mounting such an example server vertically?
- anonym29 4y agoProbably not? Make sure your hard drive caddies aren't facing down I guess, lol.
- mgarfias 4y agoIve done that before (using used cheap 1u boxes). The problem is listening to them, and then paying the power bill
- anonym29 4y agoThat's what the neighbor's outside outlet is for! /s Personally I live somewhere that is very cold for most of the year, and the cost of heating is going to be incurred for me whether I use servers, a furnace, or space heaters. The server fans also help block out noise from the freeway right next to my house too, so it's not a horrible trade off for me, but good call out, YMMV from mine.
- mgarfias 4y agothe power bill wasnt the worst. it was the constant screeching from the fans. I had them in a closed basement room but the noise penetrated the rest of the house. Its bad enough with 12 drives spinning + the fans in the 2u enclosure. Sometimes I want to just throw it all away.
- Melingo 4y agoIf you need compute there is nothing worse than old hardware. It's just not worth it at all. Ram is much slower, energy consumption is higher, core count and caches are lower. Alone caches can hurt you a lot. I had to upgrade my CPU after I got a new DSLR because the new raw files just killed it and I'm pretty sure it was the cache sizes