One less option for DIYers

[sinshiva]

Hi all,

I intended to make this a glowing post about servermonkey.com selling PowerEdge 860 servers as an alternative to using old parts or buying a consumer router.

http://www.servermonkey.com/dell-se...weredge-860-g2-2-port-configure-to-order.html

However, their pricing scheme appears to have tripled the cost as compared to an identical configuration just earlier this year. Guess I missed out. (The configuration i had in mind was to use the 2.4ghz xeon + 2gb of ram + 250gb hdd (better platter density)) Just a few months ago it would have ran you around $125. Same configuration at this time is now $360. (at this price and a couple years ago, i picked up an AMD quad core Acer slim with gigabit, 1tb hdd, 4gb of ram and of course a legit Windows 7 license. Fail, servermonkey.)

Instead this post is now about how sad it is that there aren't any fairly priced old servers anymore. There was another great site for this purpose that shut down earlier this year, but i've already forgotten the name. Guess now i shall forget this one, too.

That said, the reason i ultimately chose not to go this route was power consumption. I guess the only time you should really roll your own server anymore is if you have the parts to spare. Otherwise newer tech and power consumption will prevail.

 

[Terry Kennedy]

I intended to make this a glowing post about servermonkey.com selling PowerEdge 860 servers as an alternative to using old parts or buying a consumer router.

However, their pricing scheme appears to have tripled the cost as compared to an identical configuration just earlier this year. [...]

Look for systems on eBay. Avoid the "picture is of generic item" listings - you want to see exactly what the system has or is missing (remote access card, dual power supplies, hot-swap drives, etc.).

Don't be afraid of systems with no drives or not enough memory - you can easily deal with that separately. The CPU can also be replaced with not much more work. Changing (or adding) a RAID controller is more difficult - on some PowerEdge systems you'll need different cables to the backplane, and there are lots of oddball other things needed (battery, cable, mounting plate, and so on).

Instead this post is now about how sad it is that there aren't any fairly priced old servers anymore. There was another great site for this purpose that shut down earlier this year, but i've already forgotten the name. Guess now i shall forget this one, too.

That said, the reason i ultimately chose not to go this route was power consumption. I guess the only time you should really roll your own server anymore is if you have the parts to spare. Otherwise newer tech and power consumption will prevail.

I got a bunch of free servers that were being dumpstered at a closing data center. One was a PowerEdge R710 w/ 2 X5680 CPUs, 48GB RAM, 6 x 300GB 15K SAS drives w/ H700 raid controller. This system idles at around 230W, and a kernel + world compile w/ 12 jobs bumps it up to 280W - excellent performance.

In the same haul, I got a pair of Powervault NX3100 boxes w/ 12 2TB 7.2K SAS drives in each.

Here is a picture of some of the stuff I didn't take.