In this video we take a look at a recent eBay find of an entire server for just £1 (Excluding P&P). Let's take a look at what we've bought and find out a bit more about it.
@@timrattenbury4768 running just a NVIDIA Quadro k600 at the moment, as the server I have is a HP Proliant DL385 G7 only cost me £120 including postage from Ebay
I used to work for a hosting company and we pretty much ended up chucking out (well, recycling) 5 year old Dell servers, once they had broken even and paid for themselves. The problem was that it would cost more in space and power to run them compared to newer, more powerful machines, and would cost more in man-hours and hassle than their value to list them on eBay. That might explain the scarcity of affordable servers on the used market.
It's not a big found, the big surprise it that this goes on EBay, usually the data center keeps them and recyclers can pick up for free and they put them up on EBay but with a huge profit.
There are a lot of companies where their method for removing servers falls under two categories: scrap or scrap for e-waste. Or at least this is the case with where I work. Scrap means that it may be getting tossed into a recycling plant further down the line, or it could be parted out or resold. We basically sell it to a third party for bulk scrap pricing, so they get to handle determining its final outcome. For servers that the third party doesn't want, or which we have found faults in that would make it non-viable, they get scrapped for e-waste and sent straight to a processing facility for such. We still have a lot of things leaving the building that I wish had be re-assigned to another development group instead, but at least the majority of it won't end up in a landfill.
I think you will find that there are brokers who buy up used servers in bulk including removal and such, saving the company running the servers, a lot of money.
The issue isn't so much the server itself, its the drives. Almost every place is going to require the drives be "wiped", and for busy admins its far easier to run a drill bit, than do a 7 wipe.
Yes this is what i was thinking: If your Power grid runs on 50 Hz set your Camera to pal and choose a Shuterspeed that is a multiple of 25 (50,100,200,...)
Definitely something I'm looking into, unfortunately I only have my iPhone for recording so I'll have to see if there's a better camera app available that supports changing the shutter speed until I can afford a proper camera. Thanks for the advice :)
Nice find! I won an IBM X3550 M2 in Nov lockdown for £22! Slightly older model but 1U - 1 x E5540 2.5Ghz and 16GB RAM. I had 4 x 2.5 drives from laptop SSD upgrades, bought a 2nd CPU & Heatsink for £10 and is now running a home AdGuard + Home Assistant + OwnCloud server.
You need to change the anti-flicker settings in your camera to 50hrz due to the power frequency we use in the UK. It is more common to see this with the leds
Hah hah, I recognized the front of that machine before you even mentioned the model! I have pretty much the exact same machine, but with 64GB. of RAM and 8 x 600GB. SAS drives. I initially paid a little bit more for mine ($179 US), but it already had 32GB of RAM and 2 x 146GB SAS drives. You can find parts pretty much anywhere for them (cheap), and they're pretty much bulletproof and relatively quiet once they get through the initial startup. I think the stock RAID card is a ServeRaid 5150. I'm currently using mine as a Plex Media Server running on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Server, plus it acts as a web server for some financial apps and a phpBB forum that I'm playing with. Great machines and fairly easy to set up. I have the IMM tied into my LAN so I can access it with a web browser and start or stop it at will without actually having to go to my little server/radio room.😉
Sounds like quite a good setup. If I had more spare parts I'd likely fill this up and possibly use it for a project or testing in future. I think it'll need some newer CPU's though and possibly a better GPU if I can find an x16 riser online that's not too expensive. Ubuntu is rock solid for that sort of stuff, have you containerised any of it with docker/snaps?
We saw its got virtualization when you were in the setup, so I'd be tempted to install Xen and then have domains for all the x86 operating systems imaginable. With all those cores and filling up the RAM slots you'd get reasonable performance on each. Or install Qubes (which includes Xen and a Fedora based management domain) as a quick way of deploying a Xen-based system which would also offer above average security. To my mind that's what a box like this cries out for... By the way, it's straightforward to use Win 10 on a user domain within either Xen or Qubes: which is arguably more secure than running win 10 more conventionally.
I used a DL580 Gen 5 with 64 Gigs of RAM and 4 x 6 Core (24 cores) Xeon CPUs for a while for virtual machines. It's fun, until you see the power bill. Thing slurped 700 Watts at Idle. I decommisioned it before my GF killed me, and tbh, I also thought it was a bit much..
Just search for auctions ending soon + some people don't title their auctions particularly well and will put only the exact model number of what they're selling rather than generic terms that most people would be searching for, so very few people who'd actually be interested end up seeing the auction in the first place. It works best on particularly obscure things
I'm sure you have been told this already but all you need to do to remove the flickering is switch the camera to 25 or 50fps to match the UK AC frequency of 50hz
It's not that simple. The only real solution is to get better LED's. Quality ones will not flicker at all. It's just something cheap ones so to avoid properly rectifying etc the AC.
I remember when i bought a Qnap TS-251+ off amazon during a black friday sale a good few years back. Even though I have used ebay to buy lots of computer related stuff (im quite computer literate!) the idea never crossed my mind to pick up an older decommissioned/refurbished server unit from there.... I could have made quite a substantial saving! I remember i was looking at secondhand HP Proliant servers on ebay too! I have no idea why i never went for one in the end but i think it was something to do with the prices at the time. the cost difference between the proliant and Qnap were about the same. In any case, the TS-251+ is still going strong (i think i bought it 3 years ago???)
Sad part is local scrap yards here in MD get tons of newer servers (pretty much by the pallet), but they won't resell them even without hard drives. I've seen some of them less than a year or two old. Sad to see all those goodies go to waste.
@@CobsTech Unfortunately, there's not a particularly large amount of upward mobility with the specs of these servers, since the best processor you can get for it is an Intel Xeon X5690 6C @ 3.46GHz, and a maximum memory capacity of 288GB of RAM utilizing dual-rank 16GB PC3L-10600 LP-RDIMMs. Seems like a lot of effort to go to when you could pick up an IBM x3690 x5 on the LGA1567 platform where your highest tier processor can have 10 cores instead, and they're fairly inexpensive to pick up even in the US.
I bought a dell poweredge r810 with 4 xeon E7 8837's for 89,99 pounds. I thought it was a steal until I got hit with another 86 ish pound fee when it passed through customs. Buying stuff from the UK became a lot more expensive when they left the EU.
That's pretty solid to be fair. I've got 3 IBM X3850 X5's which use the same processors. Upgrade them to the 10 core 20 thread E7-8870's and you've got yourself a cheap 40 core, 80 thread beast. I used mine for a fair amount of blender rendering and mass virtualisation. Fee's tend to be a lot shipping those due to the size and weight.
@@CobsTech Cool, I considered buying some of those 10 core cpu's. But I'm mostly running servers for games with low requirements, like minecraft. They usually prefer raw clock speed over thread count. The 8837's go up to 2,799 GHz on all cores while the 8870's only go up to 2,533 GHz if im not mistaken. But having 40 cores and 80 threads probably comes with some bragging rights though. Not everyone can say their pc draws over 500 Watts in just cpu power on full load either.
I think the flickering problem is due to pulse with modulation, the way modern LED lights reduce power output instead of modifying the current directly. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse-width_modulation#Duty_cycle
It's interesting that you would set the priority on Cinebench = realtime because unless you are planning on doing that with most tasks that you are going to be running, it probably won't really be necessarily representative of the rest of whatever workloads you might put on said server.
The LED lights you installed are not on all the time. They actually run on a clock at a certain frequency. Your camera shutter speed is close to the same frequency as the lights. That’s why you get the “strobe” effect. None the less, wonderful video
Your LEDs are using PWM to control brightness. The brighter they are, the less chopped up their signal is. You should be able to change the framerate of your video recordings to help with that.
It's a good time to buy off eBay in the UK. Lockdown is making people very careful with money. Making it a buyer's market. I've got/seen things for half or less of the usual price in the last few weeks.
I got a similar model (without its original panel) as I can use it for my upcoming computer lab and is my personal storage server too. Model is System X3550 M3.
Enterprise hardware is always cheap used. It was used up for its service life. Doesn’t mean it can’t be refreshed and put back to work but you are going to put new storage, new ram and new power supply to get another 4 years of service. So for half new price basically.. These were good machines at this point. The management hardware was spotty though If I remember correctly
Check Amazon, as they've been selling some decommissioned servers for pretty reasonable pricing. Not sure if it's directly from Amazon or handled by a 3rd party, but they had some HP Gen8 servers for pretty reasonable prices the other day.
I've just picked up a Dell T110 ii for free. Using mainly as a NVR/storage or general kitchen puter... Ideal as it only uses around 35W at idle and they run quiet.
Definitely a fine server for that price point, though I personally prefer a bit better bang for my TDP buck. I think the lowest configurable processor generation I'd want to keep around would be some Xeon E5 v0 processors on the LGA1567 platform. You can get decacore processors for those at around or below 145W TDP, and PC3-12800 ECC RAM is reasonably inexpensive if it doesn't have as much as you'd like. Regardless, what a great bargain you've acquired here.
The UK was awesome for servers before Brexit. I purchased an R710 with 12 cores and 48 GB of RAM for little over 200 GBP about 2 years ago. With 6 caddies and 2 1100W PSU's included.
Fairly good deal. These do make good file servers. The older one is better as it has the DAS connection on the back where as the new ones you buy a additional card. £1 can't really go wrong. I recently retired my MK1 of these as it was getting a bit slow and have other newer servers.
I agree with that to be fair, I remember the MK 1's and maybe the MK 2's has external SAS ports. This ended up being replaced with the IBM ServeRAID M5025 which has 2 of them, battery backup and a bit of extra cache.
Match the shutter speed or frames per second to the refresh rate of your lights which is usually 50 in the UK or as a multiple of and then nobody gets an epileptic fit from flashing ty. The reason it changes if you focus or raise your light level is BC your probably shooting vid on auto so it will be changing the shutter speed of your cam to balance it. Move to manual and set to 50, 100 or 150 and so on or alternatively PAL should work
Can you give us a video about how you use your Microsoft Surface Pro in your workflow? :) I love to work with thin clients in combination of servers :)
I e-wasted a one of those servers last year. I was tempted to rescue it, but it had a bad PSU fan, and I just went on a power draw crusade on my homelab. So an old Dual Xeon server wasn't looking like a good idea (Already had one with similar specs that I use as an offline backup).
Great video. Would be better to do the tour while the server is off and then do post-commentary for any content while it's loud. Noise is a little distracting.
I'm currently doing a current science degree at university in the UK and watching this has honestly made me quite interesting in servers (I am only in first year hence not covering them yet lol)
I too am currently in University covering computer science. I'm at Level 4 and sadly nothing server-wise has been covered yet :( There is one module on servers and virtualisation that I'm hoping covers this sort of thing in better depth. Right now everything I have is self-taught.
@@CobsTech Oh yeah that's awesome, I thought you were an early professional coming from this video to be honest - is this not your work place or something? Either that or your own workshop lol
@@benjamincolligan Haha, I appreciate it. This is soley my homelab. I dropped out of school at 16 after geting ok-ish results from my GCSE's and managed to get an apprenticeship. I used what money I had to essentially build all this up. Personally I think having the ability to have hands-on experience with servers and networking devices is a much more efficient way to go about learning and developing my knowledge of which I can then apply at work. It's been a fundamental learning tool for me, providing a much better experience than dealing with all the 'theory' that Uni and other schools would give you.
@@benjamincolligan I'm 17 and I bought a server some months ago, I don't know much about pcs, I use it as a gaming pc mostly (yeah, that pretty stupid, I know), but playing around with these things is a lot of fun, and since the documentation for poject like mine is very very scarse, you have to do it yourself, so thanks to this, in a year I have reached a point in my life where I'm now very fond of server hardware and I know HP Proliant dl380 g6/g7 and dl380e/p g8 extremely well, the best way to learn about these things is to buy one and play around with it.
Are the M3's still used commonly in datacentre's where you are? Does surprise me businesses still run these when much more powerful hardware is available on the market nowadays.
Broadcom NetXtreme II series of adapters and especially BCM5709 are plagued with problems. I have SystemX 3650 M2 model - which is the older brother of the one in the video and my Linux system is experiencing intermittent NIC Copper link down messages. Turns out its a NIC driver problem. I hyad to manually load the network driver with parameters to solve the issue.
Excellent, Dell Precision Tower 5810 12C E5-2687W V4 3GHz 64GB Ram Quadro M4000 Workstation. I can buy this for $200 as a gaming rig. Have not decided yet
I would've picked this up in person with a single pound coin in hand if it wasn't for the current pandemic. Shipping these servers usually isn't cheap due to the weight and size sadly.
Is it oblate? Is that why it’s so adorable? Oh wow it’s so loud. I thought this was just a Server? But your using it like a computer? I am confused. Great pickup for a $1
Nice i have a DL380G6 with pretty much the same setup. 30G ram. 4x 720G drives + 2x 80g SAS 10k drives. (OS/Boot)... only useing 1 cpu right now but i do have 2 of them. 6 cpre (12 threads)
fun thing is you can plug in cheap SATA SSDs into the 3.5" SAS drive backplane. Way faster than mechanical SAS drives. And fine for SOHO use if you maintain the server yourself.
HP is power hog Not to mention how loud it is idling You touch any amount of processing and it takes off I have Dell PowerEdge R715 and R815 Compared to HP DL385 G7 both of my dell servers are extremely quiet and actually they are quieter on max power then HP DL385 G7 idling, same goes to power. Idling R715 is around 140W with 128GB and 6180SE I wouldn't touch HP with a stick not mention running it
MAN!!! Don't record 60FPS (unless outdoors, with sunlight) in Europe since it interfere with 50Hz eletricity we have here, which result in awful image quality, and that damn "blinking". Cheers.
haha plenty of people have helped with it. I've changed some settings so the shutter speed is 1/50 for future videos to stop the flickering :) Thanks for the help.
I got you beat, I got a HP proliant DL380 G7 for 0.15£ (2skr) on a online auktion and I got lucky that a friend would transport it to me free of charge (i´ll still pay a bit to my friend for good form) I hope to learn how to manage my own server and how to set it up. I believe a server works just like a pc, I guess I´m about to find out. Do you know if a server have a "C:" drive separate from the storage drives where I install the server os? There are a sd card slot and a usb port in it are one of them the place for the os?
Those are QPI Link Cables. They're designed for connecting 2 X3850 X5 systems together to act as one. Essentially this gives you an 80 core 160 thread system with a total ram capacity of 4TB I think. It's something I've been working on for a while but need to buy more RAM to get it properly working :)
