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by bombcar 840 days ago
The big problem with off-lease enterprise hardware is the power usage can quickly outrun the original costs - but that may not be an issue for everyone.

The nice thing about off-lease enterprise hardware is there is so much of it, and it's enterprise. You can easily find replacement parts, and working on that stuff is a joy, everything is easily replaceable with no tools.
2 comments
mech422 840 days ago
THIS! My Dell and HP blade chassis/server EAT power (10+ Xeon blades). I actually shut them down and started moving to SBC based stuff like odriod H2/H3's. Basically silent and just sips power. All much less heat (I live in a desert, so thats important)!

0: https://ameridroid.com/products/odroid-h3

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bombcar 840 days ago
For what it's worth, we're just starting to get to where enterprise stuff that cares about power usage is coming off-lease. Some of the newest stuff actually sips power relatively when not under load.

My biggest (current) problem is finding something that supports a ton of SATA drives and still is low power (though at some point even the power usage of spinning rust can become noticeable).

I live in the icy wilderness, so excess power to heat isn't a problem for most of the year.

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mech422 840 days ago
yeah - I don't have a need for a lot of drives, but its hard to come by...but the odroids have a PCIE expansion slot, so you might be able to add a add-on controller...

Given how huge drives are now, 1 nvme and 1 sata/spinning rust is basically all I'd ever need (I don't do video/music/etc. )

Edit: Oh shit...just checked, it does NOT have a PCIE slot..I was sure it did :-(

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kjkjadksj 840 days ago
For the price of an 8th gen off lease pc on ebay you can buy a new alder lake N minipc with 6 tdp.
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hollerith 840 days ago
Some people even use an Alder-Lake-N miniPC as a "user-facing machine" (i.e., as the only computer in the room). I do, and I love it so far (after about 45 days of using it) because it doesn't have a fan to make noise and gradually become noisier as the machine ages.

My guess is that if I was used to a much faster machine, then the machine's slowness would bother me, but it in fact does not bother me. (The machine has an NVMe interface, and I have a fast SSD in there. I have the N100 CPU because I couldn't find the N200 or the i3-N305 for immediate delivery from a non-Chinese manufacturer.)

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