On Fri, Jul 12, 2013 at 08:37:56PM +1000, Andrew McGlashan wrote:
On 12/07/2013 4:45 PM, Craig Sanders wrote:
you probably can't even find them second hand any more and why would you bother even if you could find them? it's not at all difficult to find P4s and better being given away for free or just thrown out, they're considered obsolete junk (but considerably better "junk" than the 40Mhz 386 machines with 4MB - megabytes, not gigabytes - RAM that I was running SLS and then debian on in 93 and 94).
P4 is overkill and a power hog compared to many newer processors, ATOM, cough ... ARM or AMD, there are plenty of low power units now that are very cheap and not limited too much (especially by RAM).
true, but people tend to re-purpose old machines for DamnSmallLinux and other tiny-distros. a new system might save on power, but even putting together a cheap new system (case & power-supply, cpu, motherboard, disk, and ram) will set you back at least $200. it takes several years worth of electricity savings to make up the difference between free and $200. just quickly looking at MSY's price list, the cheapest headless system I could put together would be: GT-DF1 case + power-supply $35 AMD A4-5300 CPU $54 AsRock FM2A55M-DGS m/b $58 2GB DDR-3 1333 RAM $20 Seagate SATA3 500GB $58 ---- $225 ---- that would make a decent little router/firewall/proxy-server/etc. add a few more drives and it could be a "NAS" too. Alternatively, using a Sempron LE-145 CPU and motherboard would be $195, but you'd have to add another $25-$30 for a cheap video card so it would cost about the same. the A4-5300 is a much better CPU than the Sempron, so the only real advantage to the sempron is that it can be upgraded to any AM3+ CPU, whereas the upgrade path for the A4-5300 is via the FM2 CPU socket. add another $150 or so if you want a cheap LCD screen, keyboard and mouse too. from bitter experience I am biased against cheap power supplies (they often die within months) and cheap cases (they shred your hands with rough cut metal edges while installing components), $35 for a case and power-supply sounds way too cheap. I'd prefer to spend at least $60 or $80 on a brand-name case + PSU, so the total would be closer to $250 or $300.
Heck, even the HP N54L can be had for a very reasonable price and it can take 4x HDDs if you want them -- otherwise using very little power.
they're in a much nicer case than the GT-DF1 above, and have a low-power CPU but the cheapest I can find them is $299 (or $279 for the N40L)...30% more than the cheap system above and again a lot more than free, and doesn't include any disk drives. OTOH, the HP microserver doesn't require any assembly except installing the drives, there's something to be said for that. the downside is that appliances aren't really upgradable or repairable and parts can be hard to find - if it dies out of warranty, buy a complete new replacement. a clone PC can be easily upgraded and individual components replaced if they die. if the environmental cost is a concern then the embedded energy costs of disposal and replacement are far higher than that of repair and upgrade. As for performance, the A4-5300 is significantly more powerful (and includes a radeon 7480D GPU, nice for video playback or transcodes) than the Turion II N45L in the HP, but uses up to 65W rather than 25W, although at idle it only uses about 36W or even less if you under-clock or under-volt it. http://www.cpu-world.com/Compare/388/AMD_A4-Series_A4-5300_vs_AMD_Turion_II_... The ASRock motherboard is also nicer than the HP N45L - it has 6 SATA2 ports, 10 USB 2.0 ports, and theoretically takes up to 32GB RAM (but only has 2 DIMM sockets and 16GB sticks are hard to find, so practically only 16GB RAM). spend a little more (maybe $10 or $20) to get a slightly better model m/b and you get built-in SATA3 and USB3 and maybe 4 DIMM sockets rather than two. craig -- craig sanders <cas@taz.net.au> BOFH excuse #329: Server depressed, needs Prozac