Sweet Old Rack Server!

[Lopez0101]

Okay, so I finally got the head honcho at my work to see whether he wanted to keep this old beast and he said "It's junk, you can have it if you want." So here I sit, with a massive rack server. (Weighs 40lbs easy).

As far as I can tell just from looking at it it has 1 slot style P3 733Mhz (With the option for a second). 3x256Mb, PC133, ECC, Four SCSI Ultra 2 drives hot-swappable (Two 9.1GB and two 18.2GB, all 7200RPM), CD-ROM drive, Floppy drive, a 20/40GB Tape drive and two Hot-Play redundant PSU's. One thing I noticed about the rear exhaust fan next to the CPU slots was they it's thick, a little over an inch compared to the half-inch that most fans seem to be.

Anyways, here are some pictures of it. Now I just need to get a copy of Windows NT to stick on it or something. See if I can get myself a useless, running server.

[Excuse the crappy pics, all I got is a webcam or an ever worse quality cell phone]

 

[hat]

fold in it

 

[lemonadesoda]

To be honest, your head-honcho is right; it is a piece of junk. A modern ULV core is much faster, much more capable of providing server services, and is a LOT LOT cheaper to run.

DONT fold on it. The processors dont have the power.

Use it as a fileserver? Well, honestly, a small more modern box with a 500GB SATA HDD, and ULV CPU will be much more effective and much lower power consumption and a lot quieter as well as saving space.

Enjoy the archeology study. Maybe salvage a few bits and pieces. I've done this many times. I even have a only MacIntosh box waiting for a hobby case project: stick in a modern PC fileserver.

But what you have is a monster, if not a dinosaur. Save the tape drive, ebay the other stuff, one piece at a time, call the city to remove the old rock-solid case once you've stripped it.

 

[Deleted member 3]

Agreed, folding is pointless. However if you buy 2 1GHz Coppermines for $5 somewhere and add some big drives it's fine as a fileserver. The current drives are close to worthless though, perhaps an 18GB disk for windows, but that's it.

PCI66/PCI-X SATA controller+cheap drives is the best option.

 

[Lopez0101]

Well I know it's worthless, I've just never had one to mess with. They also have another Dell PowerEdge server that I looked through, another dual socket, it's newer than this one but it still has a Pentium 3 it's just a socket style. I probably won't end up doing anything with it at all.

 

[OrbitzXT]

Never before did I think the words "sweet rack" and "old" could be used in the same sentence and not disgust me.

 

[keakar]

put it on your coffee table and tell your friends your a secretly beta testing the new xbox 480

 

[Ripper3]

Everyone has a right to an opinion, lemonadesoda, what-so-ever that opinion may be.
If it's valid, or invalid in another person's eyes, is another point entirely.

I'd say that would make a nice file server.
If anything though, the rack mount case is highly salvageable. Maybe use it for another system? Maybe use it for main system, for shits and giggles, heh.

 

[Solaris17]

I am setting an example thank you very much. I just think that spare cpu's should be used for folding the more flops the better hell i had my 400mhz k6 folding w/e gave it something to do.

 

[Demos_sav]

I agree with Solaris

You can also bench it and put your scores on HwBot and give Techpowerup some points

 

[hat]

Yes. Every little bit helps.

 

[Disparia]

While FAH is the only distributed project that I run, and I run it on multiple machines, not everyone can stand the electricity used and heat from a bunch of spare boxes. Especially oldies like this one. Best thing we can do is inform those that don't Fold at all. Get everyone's "main" box doing it - it's most likely the best producer of work units vs. electricity used.

Just my two cents... I personally try to balance this issue (cancer and disease research, as I know plenty of people who could benefit) vs. environmental impact (don't want to fix problems by causing more).

 

[Disparia]

Now this is a find

Unfortunately it was not a quad Xeon like the posting said, but rather a quad P-Pro server (with only two chips).

Oh well, it was free. I gutted it and now have a project case.

 

[Lopez0101]

Haha, well I don't think the small business could afford something like that. As far as reusing the case it weighs more than my current setup put together. Bet it would still weigh more with the PSU's and all the drives out. Also, where would I be able to find Tapes for the old tape drive?

If I could find some 1GB PC133 DIMMs to stick in there and a couple of slot style P3's that ran at a good speed I might mess with it. I haven't even tried booting it up yet. But also, a brand new machine would probably use WAY less power and be a LOT more powerful as far as F&H goes.

Oh and the P3 is passively cooled with a HUGE heatsink P3's must have ran hot. Wonder how much the OC potential is on that thing. . .

 

[Disparia]

Unfortunately that's how it goes...

An old 8-way Xeon 700Mhz server can be had for $100 to $1000 depending on options and how many people find the auction and bid, but I can't bring myself to run something like that when I can build a cheap mini-server for my house that does so much more with little worry of it dying from old age.

 

[Lopez0101]

I'd probably be better off setting up my old P4 3.4Ghz, 1.5GB PC3200 and getting a couple 120GB 7200RPM SATA drives and using the onboard RAID controller. Although in RAID I doubt they'd be as fast as the SCSI drives.

 

[Easy Rhino]

no use in folding on it. think of the power it consumes. you are trading a little bit of folding power for a crap load of electricity. youd be better off mailing a 10 dollar check every month to the folding@home people.

 

[Lopez0101]

Would it be worth while to at least hold onto the drives and maybe someday get a cheap Socket 478 board with SCSI capabilities or get a PCI card with SCSI slots on it, if they even make such a thing? Would a board that supported SCSI drives necessarily require ECC RAM or would plain PC3200 RAM work?

 

[Deleted member 3]

Would it be worth while to at least hold onto the drives and maybe someday get a cheap Socket 478 board with SCSI capabilities or get a PCI card with SCSI slots on it, if they even make such a thing? Would a board that supported SCSI drives necessarily require ECC RAM or would plain PC3200 RAM work?

SCSI is a bus similar to IDE (well, technically it's quite different of course). You can just get a PCI controller and use the disks. You don't require a special board or anything. And SCSI and ECC RAM have nothing to do with eachother. However they both mostly appear in workstation/server hardware and therefor do appear together a lot.

What kind of controller do you require? I have some lying around.

 

[Lopez0101]

Well I don't really have for four disks in my current rig (probably wouldn't want 4 more because of the heat) but the problem I just realized is that the drives are hot swappable, so they don't use molex connectors for the power so I'd have to rip out that whole enclosure that they plug in to, might as well make something similar to a NAS, lol. I'd have to rig an enclosure for it. I'd have to open the case up again and look more closely to see what I could do to power them all with a standard PSU. If I figure something out, thanks for the offer.