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.
oh dear, unfortunately it’s 2.5 inches, huh? if only those were 3.5inch models, you’d be much better in luck.
All nice until you pick up the power bill
Nice stack bro.
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.
Go work for an MSP. You’ll get free shit all the time.
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.
This is on pair with the “i found next to the road” type of posts and the “found on the junkyard” posts.
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?
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.
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…
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 😅😂
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.
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 🤣
try Cisco C220M5 or C240M5
[…] 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.
Beauties!
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
It’s that time again. More and more rx40 series poweredge nodes r coming off warranty. FEEEDDD my homelab
Specs:
740s - Dual Xeon 6130s, 12x32GB per , 6x 1.8TB SAS spinning, 2x SAS SSDs (VSAN cache tier), A hilarious amount of 1GB NICs, A sane amount of 10GB NICs
The 440 is a lot weaker, it only functioned as a host for a virtual data domain and the virtual VSAN witness appliance which isn’t a requirement anymore
/* and the OP was never heard of again after an invasion by a jealous mob of redittors */
:)
That’s gonna hurt on the electricity bill!
U can get 1.92tb enterprise ssds are pretty affordable now on ebay
I even have 10 lying around ;)
What brand
Crossing fingers I can hold of some 14Gen Dell’s from work myself (640 and 740XD) next year when they will be replaced. Not sure of the noise levels, though. Hard to figure out in our server room with several other racks and coolers… Had quite a few 13Gen 630/730s in my homelab, and my current 730XD does not make more noise than my desktop machine.
sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeesh