It's not every day I find a file-server in the discard pile.

I have to assume that's what it is (was). Fully-loaded with six
hard-drives (four of them on a SCSI RAID card), and sporting parity
memory and dual (not dual-core) Xenon processors, the hardware points
in that direction. But I can only assume because - thanks to bulging
caps - I never got more than five boot-ups from the machine before it
stopped POSTing entirely. And I never did get the OS to boot in any of
those five attempts.

So it's no surprise this venerable machine ended up on the curb.
Still, not a total loss. The power-supply is salvagable, as is a
SoundBlaster Xtreme XiFi card (something every file-server needs ;-).
The hard-drives are probably salvagable too, but - being SCSI /and/
spinning rust /and/ only 150GB apiece, I'll probably toss them before
long.

It's a shame the machine died as I've never owned a PC with Xenon
CPUs. Still, I doubt I would have kept it anyway. It's just too big (I
practically threw my back lugging the sucker home). And I did have
some fun futzing around with it beforehand, so I'm not too
disappointed. I'll claim what I can from the carcass and then send it
to the recyclers; a more noble fate than as curb-side discard anyway.

Man, I miss e-trashes at my former employer's office. :(

Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com> wrote:

> It's not every day I find a file-server in the discard pile.

> I have to assume that's what it is (was). Fully-loaded with six
> hard-drives (four of them on a SCSI RAID card), and sporting parity
> memory and dual (not dual-core) Xenon processors, the hardware points
> in that direction. But I can only assume because - thanks to bulging
> caps - I never got more than five boot-ups from the machine before it
> stopped POSTing entirely. And I never did get the OS to boot in any of
> those five attempts.

> So it's no surprise this venerable machine ended up on the curb.
> Still, not a total loss. The power-supply is salvagable, as is a
> SoundBlaster Xtreme XiFi card (something every file-server needs ;-).
> The hard-drives are probably salvagable too, but - being SCSI /and/
> spinning rust /and/ only 150GB apiece, I'll probably toss them before
> long.

> It's a shame the machine died as I've never owned a PC with Xenon
> CPUs. Still, I doubt I would have kept it anyway. It's just too big (I
> practically threw my back lugging the sucker home). And I did have
> some fun futzing around with it beforehand, so I'm not too
> disappointed. I'll claim what I can from the carcass and then send it
> to the recyclers; a more noble fate than as curb-side discard anyway.
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On Thu, 09 Feb 2023 19:30:43 +0000, ant@zimage.comANT (Ant) wrote:

>Man, I miss e-trashes at my former employer's office. :(

>Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com> wrote:

>> It's not every day I find a file-server in the discard pile.

Looking at the specs, I'm sort of sad that the machine didn't run. It
had dual-core Xenon X5482 Quad-core processors running at 3.2GHz. Even
if the backplane was slow I bet that machine could crunch some
numbers.

The SCSI drives spun at 15000RPM too (in comparison, most commercial
home-drives run at 5200rpm). The video-card was an Nvidia Quadro which
supposedly was the equivalent of an Nvidia 9800GTX (that's from the
old numbering but it was a high-end card in 2009 ;-). The DDR2 memory
is a bit problematic, but the machine had 12GB which - for its time -
was more than respectable, and it was ECC too.

I really wonder what this machine was used for. Sadly, the drives are
blanked so I'll never know.

And although I know it wasn't built for it, I would have loved to see
how it handled games. Quad-core /and/ dual-CPUs? That's just
over-kill.

But bad caps - the bane of all scroungers and probably the reason the
machine got dumped on the curb - put an end to that dream. I'll hang
on to the RAM, CPUs, soundcard and - maybe - the hard-drives. The last
may be tiny in capacity, but 15000RPM is so dang impressive!

On Thu, 09 Feb 2023 12:21:25 -0500, Spalls Hurgenson
<spallshurgenson@gmail.com> wrote:

>
>It's not every day I find a file-server in the discard pile.
>
>I have to assume that's what it is (was). Fully-loaded with six
>hard-drives (four of them on a SCSI RAID card), and sporting parity
>memory and dual (not dual-core) Xenon processors, the hardware points
>in that direction. But I can only assume because - thanks to bulging
>caps - I never got more than five boot-ups from the machine before it
>stopped POSTing entirely. And I never did get the OS to boot in any of
>those five attempts.
>
>So it's no surprise this venerable machine ended up on the curb.
>Still, not a total loss. The power-supply is salvagable, as is a
>SoundBlaster Xtreme XiFi card (something every file-server needs ;-).
>The hard-drives are probably salvagable too, but - being SCSI /and/
>spinning rust /and/ only 150GB apiece, I'll probably toss them before
>long.
>
>It's a shame the machine died as I've never owned a PC with Xenon
>CPUs. Still, I doubt I would have kept it anyway. It's just too big (I
>practically threw my back lugging the sucker home). And I did have
>some fun futzing around with it beforehand, so I'm not too
>disappointed. I'll claim what I can from the carcass and then send it
>to the recyclers; a more noble fate than as curb-side discard anyway.
>
>

*--

Where the heck do you live Spalls, finding all this stuff?

-pw

On 2/9/2023 8:57 PM, PW wrote:
> On Thu, 09 Feb 2023 12:21:25 -0500, Spalls Hurgenson
> <spallshurgenson@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>
>> It's not every day I find a file-server in the discard pile.
>>
>> I have to assume that's what it is (was). Fully-loaded with six
>> hard-drives (four of them on a SCSI RAID card), and sporting parity
>> memory and dual (not dual-core) Xenon processors, the hardware points
>> in that direction. But I can only assume because - thanks to bulging
>> caps - I never got more than five boot-ups from the machine before it
>> stopped POSTing entirely. And I never did get the OS to boot in any of
>> those five attempts.
>>
>> So it's no surprise this venerable machine ended up on the curb.
>> Still, not a total loss. The power-supply is salvagable, as is a
>> SoundBlaster Xtreme XiFi card (something every file-server needs ;-).
>> The hard-drives are probably salvagable too, but - being SCSI /and/
>> spinning rust /and/ only 150GB apiece, I'll probably toss them before
>> long.
>>
>> It's a shame the machine died as I've never owned a PC with Xenon
>> CPUs. Still, I doubt I would have kept it anyway. It's just too big (I
>> practically threw my back lugging the sucker home). And I did have
>> some fun futzing around with it beforehand, so I'm not too
>> disappointed. I'll claim what I can from the carcass and then send it
>> to the recyclers; a more noble fate than as curb-side discard anyway.
>
> Where the heck do you live Spalls, finding all this stuff?
>
One suspects next door to Dilbert.

--
I've done good in this world. Now I'm tired and just want to be a cranky
dirty old man.

On Thu, 09 Feb 2023 21:57:05 -0700, PW
<iamnotusingonewithAgent@notinuse.com> wrote:

>Where the heck do you live Spalls, finding all this stuff?

While my recent finds have been fortuitous, they aren't too unusual.
The population density makes things a bit easier but too often people
replace rather than fix, and throw out rather than recycle. But keep
your eyes open and you too can join the ranks of the scrounger ;-)

Anyway, I decided to pop the two 15000rpm SCSI drives into
period-appropriate hardware for testing and benchmarks. Tethered
together in RAID/0 - they topped out at 260MB/s sequential read. That
is - I was amused to find - 25% faster than the SSD card already in
that machine. Admittedly, that SSD was an ancient AData-brand drive
thatwas never top-of-the line to begin with (in fact, I have modern
HDDs that equal it in performance). Still, even a higher quality SSD
from just a few years later was only about 25% faster than those SCSI
drives. Pretty impressive for spinning rust.

Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com> wrote:

> It's not every day I find a file-server in the discard pile.

> I have to assume that's what it is (was). Fully-loaded with six
> hard-drives (four of them on a SCSI RAID card), and sporting parity
> memory and dual (not dual-core) Xenon processors, the hardware points
> in that direction. But I can only assume because - thanks to bulging
> caps - I never got more than five boot-ups from the machine before it
> stopped POSTing entirely. And I never did get the OS to boot in any of
> those five attempts.

> So it's no surprise this venerable machine ended up on the curb.
> Still, not a total loss. The power-supply is salvagable, as is a
> SoundBlaster Xtreme XiFi card (something every file-server needs ;-).
> The hard-drives are probably salvagable too, but - being SCSI /and/
> spinning rust /and/ only 150GB apiece, I'll probably toss them before
> long.

> It's a shame the machine died as I've never owned a PC with Xenon
> CPUs. Still, I doubt I would have kept it anyway. It's just too big (I
> practically threw my back lugging the sucker home). And I did have
> some fun futzing around with it beforehand, so I'm not too
> disappointed. I'll claim what I can from the carcass and then send it
> to the recyclers; a more noble fate than as curb-side discard anyway.

Xenon? I think you meant Xeon. You are playing too much computer games. :)

FYI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fut9VSZaSz0 -- 10 years ago this
CPU cost $2614 - How does it hold up? The Intel Xeon E5-2697V2!
--
"The tongue that brings healing is a tree of life, but a deceitful tongue crushes the spirit." --Proverbs 15:4. Dang old bodies, allergies, $, HDTVs, cable, accts., BUSY day, etc. again.
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On Fri, 10 Feb 2023 13:29:28 -0500, Spalls Hurgenson
<spallshurgenson@gmail.com> wrote:

>On Thu, 09 Feb 2023 21:57:05 -0700, PW
><iamnotusingonewithAgent@notinuse.com> wrote:
>
>>Where the heck do you live Spalls, finding all this stuff?
>
>While my recent finds have been fortuitous, they aren't too unusual.
>The population density makes things a bit easier but too often people
>replace rather than fix, and throw out rather than recycle. But keep
>your eyes open and you too can join the ranks of the scrounger ;-)
>
>Anyway, I decided to pop the two 15000rpm SCSI drives into
>period-appropriate hardware for testing and benchmarks. Tethered
>together in RAID/0 - they topped out at 260MB/s sequential read. That
>is - I was amused to find - 25% faster than the SSD card already in
>that machine. Admittedly, that SSD was an ancient AData-brand drive
>thatwas never top-of-the line to begin with (in fact, I have modern
>HDDs that equal it in performance). Still, even a higher quality SSD
>from just a few years later was only about 25% faster than those SCSI
>drives. Pretty impressive for spinning rust.
>
>

Well, I have to take care of my own garbage and pay a fee every year
to use the greenboxes to put it in.

But I have never seen anything like computer stuff there. Just the
usual garbage like old furniture, tvs, kid stuff, and other jun left
to rot tin the snow and rain until it gets picked up.

-pw

On Sat, 11 Feb 2023 01:16:57 +0000, ant@zimage.comANT (Ant) wrote:

>Xenon? I think you meant Xeon. You are playing too much computer games. :)

You are correct. I very much did mean Xeon. I wish I could say it was
a random typo, but a) I made that 'typo' multiple times in various
posts, and b) I recall going back and 'correcting' it to 'Xenon'
because 'it didn't look right' to me.

<sigh>

>FYI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fut9VSZaSz0 -- 10 years ago this
>CPU cost $2614 - How does it hold up? The Intel Xeon E5-2697V2!

The CPUs in the machine I found were dual Intel Xeon X5482 processors,
each one with 4 cores and running at 3.2GHz. That's sounds impressive
but today it is just about equivalent with the performance of a single
modern i3 8100. Apparently each CPU sold for around $1300 in 2009 but
can now be found for $30 on EBay.

Still, even in 2009 the price/performance ratio probably wouldn't have
been all that great for things like games. Multi-core machines were
still fairly new, and multi-CPU had added overhead and programming
issues; few games were optimized to utilize the added power (no
surprise; just the idea of trying to keep track of multi-core dual
CPUs makes my head hurt ;-). Presumably there was some advantage to
that arrangement with whatever the server I found was used for, but
for gaming? Not the best option.

Still, I wish I could have given it a try.

The thing must have run hot, though. Each cpu had a 20cm (~9in) tall
heat sink mounted on it, cooled by two massive 120mm fans, and a third
150mm fan in addition to those. Add to that the heat generated by the
hard-drives (running at 15000rpm, they got hot to the touch in seconds
and had their own cooling fans) the inside of that machine must have
gotten really toasty.