So we're disposing of some old servers at work...2U Dell R720 and R730 models, 2 of each I think. Probably almost 10 years old. I hate to see them go to the recyclers, but I'm not sure they're worth the effort to repurpose. They're probably too big and loud and power hungry to be practical. But I thought maybe I could scavenge the drives, buy a NAS, and configure it as a docker device. The drives are SATA & SAS. Mechanical drives... no SSD that i an aware of. There are probably 10 of each type... maybe 500 GB each.
Is something like this worth the effort? I'm not exactly blessed with a bunch of free time right now, so I'm not looking for new projects with little value. But, if this could be a windfall of sorts, I could talk myself into it.
Having worked with datacenter hardware for many years, I would say NO. Why? Because those drives are also several years (probably 5+) old. The failure rate of old drives is much higher.
Just let that hardware die.
I vaguely recall reading some study many years ago saying that power cycles on drives (or spinning up and down) was more harmful to drive life than a server sitting on with the drives just spinning along constantly. If they worked out for you and you saved some money why not try? I assume anything you'd do would involve some form of RAID, check the SMART data/etc.
Backblaze has done a ton of reporting over the years on hard drive reliability.
Interesting story.... too bad they don't say how long they keep any given drive in service and show failure rates over time.
UPDATE: They do have some of that information published. Although their longest days set is only 6 years. Based on that and some other reading, I think my time and energy are better spent elsewhere.
The question is really about what is your level of tolerance for failure may be.
Enterprise gear comes with features that are hard to replace on consumer gear. For that reason alone it could be worth considering. Stuff like a BMC to give you out of band management and hot swap bays can be nice. As others have stated the drives are likely close to their end of life, but that doesn't mean the backplan or other components are. CPU's and MB can last a very long time. My home server i built was still running fine at 11 years with consumer parts. If i did take it i would load unraid on it plan for drives to fail and replace them with larger drives if performance was acceptable.
The big question aside from the drive issue is does it make any sense when compared to low end gear today. You may want to compare it to low end consumer gear and see how it stacks up.
To explain that comment i picked up a cwwk mini pc with a intel N305 alderlake CPU. It has 8 e-cores and though not super fast when compared to other current consumer CPU's it is very fas compared to 10 year old gear. It also only uses 15-20 watts normally and is silent.
It is hard to beat free, but you may spend allot more on electricty to run that versus newer reasonable gear as well.
Last idea is they could be good for a home lab. Someone that needs multiple of that kind of gear cheap to enable certain functions,
2U servers need to be isolated from "normal" household areas. They are hot, and noisy. If the OP has a basement or maybe garage to put them in, they might be fun as toys, but I lived in and around data center servers for 30 years. I wouldn't have one in my home.
@dylan.c Those blades are fine... Sure they may be 10 years old but they're work horses. Worried about the drives? You can get SSD's pretty cheap to replace them. Put the fans on low and noise isn't much of an issue. I have a rack full (most are from 2018 to current but honestly for what I do there isn't much difference for the older ones). Again, swap out the drives for some ST ssd drives....
If you don't have a NAS, that's probably what I would do, despite the age of the drives. Get a 4-bay NAS unit and configure it as RAID 5 or 10. If a drive fails, you can always get a new drive overnight from Amazon. It's highly unlikely two or more are going to fail at the same time. To protect against catastrophic failure, back up the whole thing to Amazon Glacier. Costs a couple of dollars/month.
I don't like the mentality of throwing perfectly working electronics in the landfill just because they're old. Sometimes that makes sense especially in a business situation, but most likely you will get a good amount of use out of them.
I have a Synology DS 918+ and I have no idea how old the drives are, but they came from my former employer who went out of business and told me to take whatever I wanted. I eventually dumped the servers but kept the drives and bought the Synology. That had to be 6 or 7 years ago at least. Everything still hums along nicely.
Not sure I'll spend that kind of money right now, but maybe I'll tinker with the server as-is. If it ends up being useful, maybe i can justify investing in different hardware.
And now i have an excuse to punch an ethernet cable into the garage...brilliant!
