[rescue] Rescue Cutoff

[Lionel Peterson]

On Nov 14, 2009, at 6:26 PM, Bill Blum <bill.blum at gmail.com> wrote:

>>> What would be your 'no question, scrap' cut-off? P4s are still  
>>> useful
>>> (above 2.0 Ghz), IMHO.
>>
>>
> I've gotten rid of multiple P3 boxes in the past month, and only  
> have one
> celeron 433 in use ( FreeBSD + two NICs = gateway/firewall ).
>
> I used to jump at the chance to take castoff machines from $dayjob, or
> $previous_dayjob-- now, I just tell them to recycle 'em.
>
> My current criteria:   decent processor speed ( P4 > 1.7 GHz, Sparc  
> > 700MHz
> ), cheaper RAM ( if the motherboard's not DDR2 or DDR3, it'd better be
> already maxxed out )... and Readily Available Hard Drives.  (Which  
> for me =
> SATA, IDE, then SCSI.)
>
> I turned down a Blade 1000 a few weeks back from a former coworker  
> solely
> because I had no freaking clue where I'd get fiber channel drives  
> that I
> could be sure would work.

eBay usually has plenty, incl New Old Stock smallish drives (36-73 Gig  
range) for fairly reasonable prices...

> Similarly, I declined the Indy and the O2 that
> they had available as well.     I'm still trying to figure out how  
> to keep
> my Blade 100 running for the time being, thanks to the IDE  
> controller's
> inability to cope with large IDE drives.

Thought abought SCSI? Symbios Controllers are pretty cheap these days,  
and 73 gig drives are as well...

Any PCI SATA controllers supported by your OS of choice? There must be  
something that will work...

Lionel