These were originally built as a VSAN which I plan on replicating once I build a proper home vSphere environment. Each of the 740s have about 12TB raw in them but I’d like to load the 8 empty bays in each, anyone know where I can get a stack of cheap/used 1.8TB 2.5" SAS drives? I care more about capacity compared to speed as I plan on making the 440 a standalone all flash host.
I ran a stack of 630’s we decom’ed from work (5 of them) in 2020. When we moved in 2021 I didn’t want to setup the full rack in the garage again. I sold them all to a local place (server monkey) for 2k a pop.
10k.
If you get bored with them, look into resale options. Give yourself a little bonus. These gen are harder to find right now. You’re in a unique position to buff up your savings if you feel so inclined.
Good score!
Hohooo. I hope that after I graduate I’m going to have the same opportunities as some of you to take old equipment home.
work in IT long enough and I can guarantee you will. I’ve gotten tens of thousands of $ worth of free shit over the years.
Sounds like great motivation to pass the upcoming exams lol
Apart from gaining relevant experience using these “beefy” boys I can’t fathom why pple go for them.
A modern tiny/mini/micro PC, as Patrick Kennedy from ServeTheHome calls them, from the likes of Dell, Lenovo, Minisforums, ASRock, Beelink etc should outperform blades not only on compute but tasks that are now being offloaded such as encryption, media codecs etc
You could break even in 1-2 years on elecricity costs alone(depending where you are)!
/* and the OP was never heard of again after an invasion by a jealous mob of redittors */
:)
Nice stack bro.
U can get 1.92tb enterprise ssds are pretty affordable now on ebay
I even have 10 lying around ;)
What brand
Sigh, man everyone has so much damn luck. Thousands of bucks worth of stuff for free because it’s out of warranty? I mean Jesus. Couldn’t even afford one of those on eBay.
Be thankful that you don’t have those, because those thousands of bucks worth of stuff incurr another thousand bucks of costs to setup for proper use. Most end up selling, OP is a badass for using it.
And the power bill and earplugs. Still… who here would say no?
Hell my team is forced to still be using some servers that have been out of warranty for 2 years now because it takes SO LONG to get corporate to go through the purchasing process and then get someone to actually set up new servers in the data center. OP got servers for free that are nicer than half the servers my team is using in production.
Go work for an MSP. You’ll get free shit all the time.
This is on pair with the “i found next to the road” type of posts and the “found on the junkyard” posts.
That’s gonna hurt on the electricity bill!
Beauties!
It’s that time again. More and more rx40 series poweredge nodes r coming off warranty. FEEEDDD my homelab
There’s tons of cheap used or new-old-stock 1.2TB 2.5" SAS drives on eBay. The 1.8TB drives are significantly more expensive though.
this is the way
oh dear, unfortunately it’s 2.5 inches, huh? if only those were 3.5inch models, you’d be much better in luck.
Jesus christ your lucky, those sell for some serious dough. I don’t even see Rx40 on the second hand market much, mostly going from Rx10/20’s to Rx30’s now.
try Cisco C220M5 or C240M5
r740s are still fine to be used for production, even with new 15 and 16 gens available.
aren’t those worse than a modern i3?
Which modern i3 supports hundreds of gigabytes of RAM and has a shit ton of cores?
Hmm, obviously not…
Right before they went EOL we ordered stacks and stacks of them. They’re perfect for our edge sites and match the rest of our deployed hardware, so it only made sense. Also have a lot still in production for clustering, tho we finally started to get some x50 and x60 equipment.
As far as I remeber, it was possible to prolongue dell support for them, so, yeah, they are still good.
We’ve still got 7 R640’s in production across two locations.
That is what I am talking about, they are still good for running them especially for SMB, if they can get refurb servers with hardware support.
Yeap, our customer using used R740s for VMware cluster and Starwinds VSAN for high availability. The only thing I would mention is not using refurb drives.
Same and an R720 😅
Well, it depends from the worload, but I would really change them to new hardware already.
I’ve got 2x R720xd’s since they got sorted out at work. Bougjt a “new” power brick for one of those (other 3 were fine) since a capacitor exploaded when i turned it wrong… And that was it. Apperently it just sat in a corner for a year to be soon sorted out and the capacitors were dry…
Anyways, im using those in my homelab so ce then, 24/7 for about half a year now. Power usage is only 210w in idle, unless I have much traffic gling on there… Then it is at about 300w each…
Perfect for my needs. Runs my Proxmox, HomeAssistant, few VMs, filehosting for my Videos, DHCP-Router, Firewall, IPS/IDS Systems (im just getting into this, so i set them up for fun internally) and so on.
Two are allmost too much tbh 😅😂
Shit I got an r940 hand me down that’s collecting dust cause of California electricity prices lol. Anyone around the bay who wants to buy it for a discount let me know 🤣
[…] those sell for some serious dough.
Using a position in IT for personal gain doesn’t seem ethical, so I really hope OP pays it forward when they’re done with this equipment.
I’ve been waiting for my workplace to decommission our VNX2’s. Sadly, we keep shelling out for the extended warranty, because our company is structured such that paying through the nose with operating budgets tends to be preferred over spending capital on equipment.
You’ll be stealing all your licenses, right?