Of course, getting that new product is always exhilarating and fun for the most part. But let me ask, is that always the best practice? Let me explain just a bit before you answer that.
If you need to save a little money, start a project on a limited budget, want to present a proof of concept before you jump all in, or any of the other million reasons why corporations or people might want to save a little money or resources. You might want to consider the land of leftover computer parts, just like in the land of forgotten toys- those old computer parts still have a lot of life left in them.
Remember, many of these old computer parts worked fine when replaced but got replaced because the newer, shiny stuff was a little faster or just shinier. After all, AWS still uses Haswell and Broadwell Xeon CPUs T2 general-purpose workload instances. If we follow AWS’ lead, using these for general-purpose environments such as a budget friendly content creacreator’s systems, family media server, a local NAS, Proxmox server-VMs, Code Repositories, small to medium databases, prototype environments, staging environments, and the list goes on. In my opinion, if they are still working for Amazon, they will work for your project as well.
Looking to the future by looking back. Let me show you a few systems that I have recently built and give you a few examples of how they were used and pricing.
The first system is a full tower dual intel Xeon E5-2690-V4 processor system built for a local business using it as one of their test bed servers. It has served websites, worked in a cluster, mined cryptocurrency for a bit, mined data, Ghost Blog server, and played as a Plex server. This system is a full-blown server. But unlike the newest product, it will not break the bank.
As of this writing, system one's
Prices Pre-Tax:
As of this writing, system one's Prices Pre-Tax parts only price:
Motherboard $250.00 Supermicro X10DRH-CT
RAM $125.00 128GB Samsung PC4-2400T Registered ECC Memory LRDDR 2400MHz
Xeon CPU $110.00 Dual E5 2690-V4 (28 Core 56 threads)
Hard Drives $250.00 Samsung 1TB 870 EVOs x 2 (Very use case dependent)
PSU $150.00 Corsair RM850x Power Supply
Case $120.00 Phanteks Enthoo Pro (PH-ES614P_Black)
CPU Cooler $120.00 Noctua 90mm units
OS Free Ubuntu 22.04
Total price $1125.00 (Parts only Pre-Tax)
This system can house 24 hot-swappable 2.5” SSDs, adding extra hardware, 10 3.5” SATA drives, 2TB of RAM, PCIe slots for additional hardware such as storage expansion, network cards, GPUs, and even a sound card, but that is not what they are made for.
What software can it run, you ask?
Win 10 Pro, Win 11 Pro, any Lynx server-based OS, Server 2019 and older, DaVinci Resolve and most other photo and video editing software, True NAS, UnRaid, Adobe, Affinity, Ghost Blog platform, VS code and other Editors, Containerized environments like Docker and Vagrant, HashiCorp products, and even modern gaming. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlHb4IJrSIM) But come on, it's not really for gaming.
The second system is more home-friendly, housed in a uATX case with a single Xeon CPU. Also, the motherboard is new, whereas the dual CPU system utilized a refurbished Motherboard, used CPUs and RAM.
As of this writing system, 2.
Prices Pre-Tax:
Motherboard $224.00 ASRock Rack EPC612D4U uATX Server Motherboard
RAM $175.00 128GB Samsung PC4-2400T Registered ECC Memory LRDDR 2400MHz
Xeon CPU $55.00 single E5 2697-V4 (18 Core and 36 Threads)
Hard Drives $100.00 Samsung 1TB 870 EVOs x 2
Case $75.00 Silverstone Precision PS16 Micro-ATX
Total price $754.00 Pre-Tax Parts only
(Everything in this build is new, but the CPU & RAM)
Configured in this way, the system can hold up to 6 hot-swappable 2.5” SSDs or 2 3.5" SATA drives. It to 128GB RAM, this system's max RAM. This system can run any of the abovementioned software, so I won't repeat it. This system became part of a HoshiCorp cluster a year ago and is still performing as intended.
This would make a very nice, affordable server with years of life left on it. But the point of this message is to promote the use of things that will work for your use cases that won’t break the bank. These kinds of computers work just fine for content creation, media editing, building local cloud infrastructures, multimedia servers, and so on. Will the newest products be faster? Of course, they will. But if you’re starting out or have a limited budget, are the extra few minutes saved worth the thousands of dollars they cost? If you can’t afford them or just like saving money, in my opinion, they’re not.
Let me know what you think?
How have you used old computers?
Would you be interested in hearing more about this concept?
Do you have a project where these servers would work perfectly?
Let me know.
Thank you for looking
Dave
Comments