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Dirt cheap decomissioned servers?

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mapleLC:
Looking for a server, but the landscape out there is pretty vast and there are a lot of acronyms I don't know anymore  :palm:

What is the best used I can get for eBay scale money?  I can modify the server for most any need, so the most solid basic platform is primary, so what should we grab before Dave reviews one?

I plan to install Linux, which shouldn't matter but is germane. 

SiliconWizard:

--- Quote from: mapleLC on February 27, 2023, 10:09:00 pm ---Looking for a server, but the landscape out there is pretty vast and there are a lot of acronyms I don't know anymore  :palm:

What is the best used I can get for eBay scale money?  I can modify the server for most any need, so the most solid basic platform is primary, so what should we grab before Dave reviews one?

I plan to install Linux, which shouldn't matter but is germane.

--- End quote ---

These days, it looks like one of your best bets is to go for a X99 platform with one (or several if you can find a multi-CPU one) Xeon E5 v4 (Broadwell EP). DDR4 ECC is surprisingly "cheap" at the moment, so you can get comfy amounts of RAM for not too much.

Just a suggestion, there are probably alternatives.

brucehoult:
What are your actual requirements?

These days especially, purchase price savings on old grunty machines can often be quickly eaten up by electricity usage compared to newer hardware.

Halcyon:
As already has been suggested, what are you looking to do with it?

What concerns me is you state "there are a lot of acronyms I don't know anymore". I'm not exactly sure what terminology you're referring to, but don't think for a moment that enterprise servers (particularly brands like HP, Dell or IBM/Lenovo) are just "big computers". Whilst, fundamentally, yes they are, they often come with quirks and caveats that you won't know about unless you are either familiar with the brand, or have done enough homework to satisfy yourself that a particular make/model will work for your use-case.

One example might be that some older servers don't support booting from PCIe cards, you must use a SATA/SAS drive, USB or SD card.

Another might be that you are locked to using specific OEM hardware in some cases, or that it doesn't have the number of IO ports (like SAS) that you expect inside.

shapirus:
Yeah, these days servers don't necessarily need to be big and noisy.

As an example, here's a true server which is used as a data acquisition system to monitor mains voltage and waveform quality 24/7. The actual computer is smaller than the ADC board it's receiving data from:

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