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Older Xeon's still worth it?
I have the opportunity to purchase some older servers in Bulk, and just curious if people think it's worth it at all. Thinking about either using them for small VPS's or just reselling them locally if possible.
Any opinions on the older Xeons and if it's even worth the expensive to purchase these (about $21 per server + drives cost) and have them colo'd?
They are all dual CPU machines, Xeon E5148, E5345, E5405, E5310, X5355, X5550, E5450, E5462, etc, a few others of that Era.
Servers themselves come with between 4-16 GB DDR2, most of them are 8 or 16. About half come with either IMPI or KVM. Most are Supermicro X7DBR-E, with a few other Supermicro boards thrown in the mix.
I normally just lease servers, but the offer seems too good to be true at $20 a server so wanted to see what other people think.
Comments
I would avoid these servers because their power usage is high, making it difficult to sensibly rent them and make money at the pricing you mentioned.
They could be worth it if you have free / very cheap power.
If you pay for power, you can get a lot more performance per watt from modern gear.
You would probably be better off renting the servers as they're pretty expensive to colocate unless you get an insanely good deal on your bandwidth+power. Not worth it in my opinion.
Thanks for the quick responses, that's what I was thinking as well. Assuming that would make them a difficult resell as well? Almost tempted to just get them and relist them for $25-$30 a piece on craigslist or something, but also don't want to get stuck with $1000 worth of scrap metal....
They aren't worth shit because of power cost. Never underestimate the power cost.
Get at least Xeon E5 v2.
Switch the CPUs to the L series and that's half the amount of power. They might be worth it if you can get a deal on power costs?
You could do this but Dual L5420 machines usually go for about $100-$150 with 16GB of RAM for example but you might get some sales? Maybe set a limit of $200 on machines. If theres a lot of shipping costs it's not worth it. Newer hardware will be better though in both performance and efficiency and I'm pretty sure E3-1230v3's etc are pretty reasonable now.
They still do their job, though they consume a lot of power.
If your provider charges a lot you per power usage, avoid it.
I would be interested in one for that price. Where are you located?
is there a way to out right buy the server from you and have it colocated with psychz where my other hp server is at? as far as I can tell I don't believe psychz charges for power as I checked it and they don't seem to be metering the power usage only the bandwidth so that makes it easy to get one of these old servers from you and run it alongside my hp server colocated with psychz. and if I could get them cheap enough I could try to use them myself for trying to start a dedicated side of cubedata though to be honest I would just like to get one from you for now due to I am still running vps services and don't know if I have the capital to jump into the dedicated renting business right now.
Everyone charges for power. It just depends on whether its broken down into its own line item.
My cc X3450 is one of my favourite servers, it's still a very decent CPU.
The X3450 was the first of the modern-era power efficient single socket non L-Xeon. Great CPU and great platform.
I have 20+ X34xx, E54xx and E55xx old servers retired from production environement, sitting idle in the lab. They are still working but I was not been able to repurpose them in the original configuration. They exceed the power cap on our current hosting provider housing contract, and they will overload our HVAC. The commercial value is almost zero.
I have been able to reuse some of them for non-critical purposes by removing the second processor, halving the RAM and swapping the power-hungry 15k rpm mechanical drives with either consumer grade SSDs or cheap 2Tb WD RED drives. I also removed the RAID BBU - after 7+ years it is too old to be trusted. I physically removed it because on previous generation HP and IBM servers the exhausted Li-Ion BBU battery shorted out, turning off the server abruptly. I don't want to take chances.
As side note, some very old Xeon servers (Fujitsu etc) have nice solid copper CPU heatsinks that are just perfect for homebrew electronic projects and would cost more than 20$ each if bought in a store.
Good tip on the copper heatsinks. There aren't many of them anymore. Cheaper and lighter aluminum nowadays.
Anything ?55xx (E5520 etc.) is good - you can likely flash the bios/EFI and use up to a X5690 which is not that bad power wise. DDR3, usually up to 8GB sticks, most good servers (eg. HP G6) can take 16GB DIMMs in full config and use any CPU (including the obscure X5687 and the X5698, an Intel unlisted 4.4Ghz dual core). Avoid Apple Xserve (any), they don't eat 56 series CPUs.
?54xx is ok if you have cheap power, but the 45nm CPUs are not really efficient. Mostly DDR2.
?53xx and older (65nm and up) is pretty much useless unless you have free power, free AC or a cold climate.
If you have cold climate and use electric heating then you can run them in the winter to heat your home/office and offset the electticity costs with the rental income. Otherwise not worth it.
Craigslist like you mentioned might be a good bet. I had my L5420 shipped back from Dacentec and sold on Craigslist to some guys who needed it for their small office.
I,can buy 2 or 3 1U 16gb servers eith ipmi/kvm. Pm me with details, please.
If you decide to move forward, look for the systems that use DDR2 ECC Reg RAM and not the FB-DIMMs. FB-DIMMs are terrible on power. SuperMicro X7DCA-L or Dell CS24-SC are two examples.
I did just find out that my local datacenter charges power by the circuit...so, this might actually be an option.
No - all of those are junk by today's standards. First, the electricity cost makes them completely uneconomical. Second, the age of the hardware (not just the CPUs - old CPUs need old motherboards need old memory...) is very concerning.