2nd hand servers
- Thread starter GodAtum
- Start date
Associate
i suppose it all depends on why the system is no longer used, some are through upgrading and some because they have failed and just trying to make money hoping they don't fail within the warranty period they give you.
dell and hp servers do have diag software which can be run to help weed out problems not full proof though.
dell and hp servers do have diag software which can be run to help weed out problems not full proof though.
Associate
- Joined
- 1 Jan 2013
- Posts
- 178
To hijack the thread slightly, does anyone know of reputable sources for refurbed/eol Dell or HP?
Soldato
The problem with an enterprise grade server at home is likely to be noise and power usage ...
Look at the HP renew program.
Soldato
Although they've got better over the years, ex-corporate rack servers are going to be big, noisy and suck power.
I'd be looking at the current HP / Lenovo / Dell microservers or mini towers. For instance, I had an e-mail offering this yesterday:
All for £149+VAT after cashback.
Don
At work, we have bought a quantity of servers from the auction site (Mainly HP DL380G6's), never had any issues - usual rules apply, if it looks to good to be true it normally is - buy from a seller who has a range and quantity of servers, and then they are likely to be decomissioned (e.g. on a replacement schedule), or from a business that has gone bankrupt.
In our experience the only things that normally go wrong with used servers are RAID controller Batteries and Power Supplies, both of which are cheap enough to replace.
Don
Depends on what you plan to use them for - we use them for test servers or non-critical servers - and typically in Raid 10. Given the cost they can be an absolute bargain, getting 6 disks for less than the price of 1 new HP one, certainly helps bring the cost of servers down.
Not had any issues with 2nd hand disks either, with HP disks they tend to either work or not, no grey area in between (HP Raid controllers seem to very aggressively mark disks as failed - a good thing).
Soldato
I would avoid using 2nd hand disks. Servers - yes.
Don
Any particular reason? - even new disks can fail.
Surely it depends on the use case? While I wouldn't put 2nd hand disks in my Database servers or even for my file server (which are 100% business critical), for test environments and other roles (where even a failure would be just an inconvenience), then I don't see the issue.
Also we never use single disks - even for test enviroments, it is always RAID1 or RAID10, and if there is room a Hot Spare - a failure becomes an inconvenience, albeit a £25 vs £150 inconvenience (E.g. for a HP 2.5 146Gb).
Enterprise disks tend to be better quality (longer MTBF etc), and on the whole better looked after (proper cooling in data centres or server rooms etc.) than consumer disks, which I wouldn't dream of buying 2nd hand.
If anything because our 2nd hand disks can come from separate sources, overall reliability could be slightly better, as they come from different batches, have different wear characteristics, and so are perhaps less likely to fail at the same time.
Last edited:
Soldato
Because disks are the hardest working part and most likely part to fail in a server. Yes new drives fail, but new drives have warranties, used don't or are very short.
All the drives in my home server are HP renew - so 3 year warranty with a much lower price. Kind of a happy medium. At work all the drives are brand new when required. Probably going to jinx it, but in the older servers we're still running (DL380 G5s, ~6 years old) we've had 1 RAM stick go bad, one cache battery and maybe 10 disks. The newer G7 and 8's have (again probably jinxing!) only ever had the odd disk fail.
All the drives in my home server are HP renew - so 3 year warranty with a much lower price. Kind of a happy medium. At work all the drives are brand new when required. Probably going to jinx it, but in the older servers we're still running (DL380 G5s, ~6 years old) we've had 1 RAM stick go bad, one cache battery and maybe 10 disks. The newer G7 and 8's have (again probably jinxing!) only ever had the odd disk fail.
Soldato
HP Make buying renew stuff difficult unfortunately. I get mine through resellers, or sometimes ebay (although that's a gamble!).
Soldato
If the controller doesn't do JBOD just set each drive as an individual RAID 0 drive?