What's wrong with these?

ThatJoe · 23 May 2008 at 00:13

Really not sure if i'm allowed to do this, but i'm not actually giving a direct link to the page

If i'm not then please post and i'll remove the link.

Basically just looking round on the bay (this could be any bay, even.. baywatch) anyway, noticed this server (Item No. 230253487289) and this one (Item No. 390000001850) Just wondered if anyone with some experience with ebay/servers could tell me why they're going for so cheap? This is my first time using the mystical bay.

Thanks.

Nitrojan · 23 May 2008 at 00:14

Thief! I noticed those

Daniel · 23 May 2008 at 00:22

Nothing wrong with them except they are old tech upto todays multi core cpu's which has driven the price down and they have probably been running 24/7 for the past 5 years or more.

daz · 23 May 2008 at 00:47

They're decent servers but if you're thinking of co-locating them or similar they probably use at least an amp of power. Compare to something more recent like an R200, and they're really bad value especially when you consider what you might have to do should something serious go wrong (motherboard screws up, for example.)

The Dell R200s with a quad core processor can be had for really cheap these days... hosting companies are providing them for £50-£100 a month.

dave-lew99 · 23 May 2008 at 11:38

Those prices are about right really tbh, £100-200 on the bay will get you a pretty decent server these days - so much so we're (at work) thinking of getting some this way - saves us money and is good for the envrionment (recycling)

You also get decent SCSI disks/Xeon's instead of the budget Dell stuff these days which is all SATA and desktop CPUs (probably cut corners elsewhere) as long as you accept the risk that the disks will fail sooner (so RAID appropriatly) and can budget for quick replacements just in case it's quite a good idea.

daz · 23 May 2008 at 12:41

dave-lew99 said:
You also get decent SCSI disks/Xeon's instead of the budget Dell stuff these days which is all SATA and desktop CPUs (probably cut corners elsewhere) as long as you accept the risk that the disks will fail sooner (so RAID appropriatly) and can budget for quick replacements just in case it's quite a good idea.

The R200s use Xeons, and can use SAS disks (in hardware RAID).

dave-lew99 · 23 May 2008 at 12:56

daz said:
The R200s use Xeons, and can use SAS disks (in hardware RAID).

Ooh you got me all excited for nothing

Just specced an R200 with a couple of 146gb SAS disks and a Perc6...came to over £800!

The CPU is overkill for our application anyway, and we only need around 60Gig of RAID-5'd storage anyway

And i thought i was going to be able to persuade the boss to get some shiny new kit...

daz · 23 May 2008 at 13:49

dave-lew99 said:
Ooh you got me all excited for nothing

Just specced an R200 with a couple of 146gb SAS disks and a Perc6...came to over £800!

The CPU is overkill for our application anyway, and we only need around 60Gig of RAID-5'd storage anyway

And i thought i was going to be able to persuade the boss to get some shiny new kit...

Yeah problem with them is they only take 2 disks AFAIK. Can get the price down much cheaper if you speak to a rep though, think we paid ~£700 a piece for 3 quad core machines with two 15k 300GB SAS drives with hardware RAID1 last time.

dave-lew99 · 23 May 2008 at 14:02

ah well, still a little too much for us - we just need a backup box at a remote office - if the vpn to us goes down they just need to be able to use it for sending email and some basic file storage...i'm just angling for nice kit that's all and i'd rather have some 2nd hand server kit over a desktop any day.

I can only really justify around £100 on the server as we need to buy them VOIP phones too.

bigredshark · 25 May 2008 at 14:07

dave-lew99 said:
You also get decent SCSI disks/Xeon's instead of the budget Dell stuff these days which is all SATA and desktop CPUs (probably cut corners elsewhere) as long as you accept the risk that the disks will fail sooner (so RAID appropriatly) and can budget for quick replacements just in case it's quite a good idea.

Might be true, but if you're buying servers on the bay who cares. You don't need a pair of quad xeons to run exchange and AD for a small office, you don't need that kind of processing power for much really. SATA in hardware raid is plenty reliable for most people too, 15k drives in RAID6 are great for performance but most people won't actually make use of the difference.

The actual downside is support, server's aren't expensive - 3 years of 4 hour response support is expensive....

dave-lew99 · 25 May 2008 at 17:14

We don't bother with support - we just do everything in house - we certainly have the skill set at hand, so why not make use of it.

MikeTimbers · 25 May 2008 at 17:52

2nd one is much better value as it includes the second cpu. But both will use much more power and be much slower than modern Core2 based Xeons.

bigredshark · 25 May 2008 at 18:14

dave-lew99 said:
We don't bother with support - we just do everything in house - we certainly have the skill set at hand, so why not make use of it.

Depends what you need but if a motherboard fails then all the skills you have won't matter a bit, if you can live without the server for a few days then fair enough but most people can't...

dave-lew99 · 25 May 2008 at 18:45

That's why we're buying the backup server.... it'll be setup so we can all switch to it on the fly if need be, as well as it being the primary server for the remote site.