What would one say is the sweet spot for second hand servers?

[Ranayna]

Wow, I remember those 1950s and 2950. Loud beasts they were. I cannot imagine that those things are really effective nowadays, seeing those SAS bays puts them at about 14 years old...
Compare that to the more recent 730 (also old now ) 2U Rack servers. Those are actually quite silent when they are cold enough. Keep those in mind for an upgrade.
Another, comparatively silent server is the DELL 2900, the tower version of the 2950. That one was also silent.

[Towger]

They typically go into a datacenter and then they thow them out after a while. You dont want a SOHO server second hand, thats going to be expensive. You want something that big company like Google/Amazon/Facebook used, because they flood the market with used parts.

That looks like an Ikea table, you don't show what holds up the server's weight at the back :-)  I think what Google/Amazon/Facebook use these days it totally custom built and not going appear on the second hand market, except maybe in the endless supply of on eBay etc of cheap server CPUs and memory from China.

[tszaboo]

They typically go into a datacenter and then they thow them out after a while. You dont want a SOHO server second hand, thats going to be expensive. You want something that big company like Google/Amazon/Facebook used, because they flood the market with used parts.

That looks like an Ikea table, you don't show what holds up the server's weight at the back :-)  I think what Google/Amazon/Facebook use these days it totally custom built and not going appear on the second hand market, except maybe in the endless supply of on eBay etc of cheap server CPUs and memory from China.

Not my picture. But why would you need to support it at the back? 19 Inch is designed to be mounted with bolts on the front.
Here is a ebay listing for ex google search appliance:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Dell-Google-R710-SFF-GB-7007-Gen-II-12-Core-2-66GHz-X5650-24GB-H700-No-2-5-HDD/174172343667?epid=1801409820&hash=item288d7b0d73:g:7HsAAOSw8bteL0Yy
They used various Dell R710s, which were not branded like that cheese above.
Even though a company will use their own format for the servers, it will still use a lot off the self servers. Because your own server lead time might be, such that you miss a market. Then you just buy stuff from HP, or Dell, whatever you can get your hands on.

[Ranayna]

*Any* Server, except maybe one of those crapply low powered appliance types, needs to be fixed at the back.
Even a proper, stable and massive rack will not hold a PowerEdge 2U Rack server if there is nothing below. Those are just too heavy. The rack rails would bend, or maybe even the "ears" of the server could snap off.
The IKEA table in the picture likely has some bracket mounted on the rear legs.

[Monkeh]

They typically go into a datacenter and then they thow them out after a while. You dont want a SOHO server second hand, thats going to be expensive. You want something that big company like Google/Amazon/Facebook used, because they flood the market with used parts.

That looks like an Ikea table, you don't show what holds up the server's weight at the back :-)  I think what Google/Amazon/Facebook use these days it totally custom built and not going appear on the second hand market, except maybe in the endless supply of on eBay etc of cheap server CPUs and memory from China.

Not my picture. But why would you need to support it at the back? 19 Inch is designed to be mounted with bolts on the front.

Have you ever installed a piece of rack mount equipment bigger than a switch?

[Towger]

Without any support from the back, the weight of those servers would rip the wood screws from the table legs.  They are over 2 feed long and can weight ~25kg each.

Get you hands on an old one and take it apart, the build quality is much higher than a standard PC.

The Google appliances were sold/leased to companies to index their internal documents.  I don't know how much they differ from what they use internally.  But, I believe the they have long since moved to blades, running from a common (data center) 48v volt bus.

Years ago the likes of Yahoo used bog standard generic desktops. The idea was was they were much cheaper than a proper server.

[tszaboo]

Without any support from the back, the weight of those servers would rip the wood screws from the table legs.  They are over 2 feed long and can weight ~25kg each.

Yeah, probably. I see people placing L profiles on their lackrack.

Have you ever installed a piece of rack mount equipment bigger than a switch?

Nope, biggest thing was rackmounting multimeters.

[Haenk]

I pretty much was in the same situation a couple of weeks ago - our storage was close to the limit and the disks reached their end of lifespan. So I went with a 24bay LFF used Supermicro, with Trays, 64GB of RAM, a very nice RAID-card with BBU plus all the trays, dual E5-2670, dual PSU - for just 750,- EUR shipped, including a 1-year warranty. That's a fracture the costs of a new server, you won't save that Money on power costs. (I might pull one CPU, as one CPU is enough for the job). 24x8TB, running on RAID6. Server is running on Windows10 (Desktop), that's good enough for a two-person use with lots of data.

[Mr. Scram]

I pretty much was in the same situation a couple of weeks ago - our storage was close to the limit and the disks reached their end of lifespan. So I went with a 24bay LFF used Supermicro, with Trays, 64GB of RAM, a very nice RAID-card with BBU plus all the trays, dual E5-2670, dual PSU - for just 750,- EUR shipped, including a 1-year warranty. That's a fracture the costs of a new server, you won't save that Money on power costs. (I might pull one CPU, as one CPU is enough for the job). 24x8TB, running on RAID6. Server is running on Windows10 (Desktop), that's good enough for a two-person use with lots of data.

Are you sure about the power consumption? Those are rather ancient servers by now and definitely not frugal. The E5-2670 boxes on offer often are old Facebook servers they got rid of a few years back. They flooded the market and were surprisingly cheap back then.

[borjam]

I highly recommend not mixing network services (web, file, mail, etc) with local terminals (VMs serving thin clients) or (!!!) local users. I thought the server and thin client model was obsolete since the 18th century.

Hence ransomware, mainteinance hell...