3 ms·

"We could replace so many data centers with old desktops." But I assume for way more energy costs? And the manual labour to sort out the different mainboards a

• Fwirt 1y ago
  See my other reply, when people count energy costs they fail to take into account the existing sunk cost of producing said resources, and the energy from having to build out new infrastructure to create these “more efficient” datacenters. It’s like when people replace their fridge with a “more efficient” one and wipe out any energy savings with the cost of the new fridge. The difference in energy use will not pay for the new fridge for many years and by then you’ve already replaced the new fridge with another newer “better” one.
  • hrimfaxi 1y ago
    The only energy cost that matters is to the operator. Old hardware costs more to run so why would I run it? That there was energy used to produce the device and the replacement is literally not a factor in the calculation.
    • pcdoodle 1y ago
      [flagged]
      • deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
      • typpilol 1y ago
        It's literally an economic pressure. Even if they were the same efficiency the older takes up way more space. Why would you pay for 5x the data center space? Surely building they out isn't energy cheap either
      • bloomingeek 1y ago
        Hah, smooth brain! (A little harsh, tho.)
        • pcdoodle 1y ago
          My bad, i get in a mood on HN sometimes.
    • froh 1y ago
      no. you have to go for TCO to justify upgrades. energy alone most of the time doesn't justify replacing old hardware. factor in space (=rent), age related increase in failure rate (=servicing), computer power needs (=opportunity costs) then together with the energy needs you find good points in time to justify an upgrade. energy is the least relevant of those.
      • deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
• Aachen 1y ago
  GP already replied in a sibling comment, so all I can add is another article about this in case you want to read more about it with concrete numbers: https://wimvanderbauwhede.codeberg.page/articles/frugal-computing/ https://wimvanderbauwhede.codeberg.page/articles/frugal-comp...
• IgorPartola 1y ago
  Exactly. Also space. I suspect that if there was any reasonable amount of economic advantage to using old hardware we would see multiple organizations systematically building large datacenters out of the free hardware. As a hobbyist, I would love to get my hands on more stuff like this. But I don’t see how it could be used for anything at scale.
• cons0le 1y ago
  No company in america is going to do this. These cheap asses will definitely won't pay 60/hr to an army of tecnhicians to macguyver together new servers from old trash. We would need to have a madmax level catastrophe where supply chains collapse to have this make economic sense. The labor is the biggest cost. I exclusively use clusters of old computer for all my stuff and honestly, it sucks yo. Everything break all the time