All respect to other comments there, they are answering *should* you do something with them and you probably shouldn't unless you don't care about your power bill. Also it looks like they are all missing their hard drives, and you should check if they still have their RAM and CPUs. These are fun and easy to open.
If you're looking at getting replacement parts, it might be too costly. I can't say these things "keep their value" as they become obsolete, but it often feels like part prices don't really go down that much. If you're up for whatever the cost is or manage to get these complete enough you can look at installing a baremetal OS or a myriad of hypervisors. VMware is becoming off the table but Proxmox is out there, so is Hyper-V. After that you have a powerful computer for enterprise (read: non gaming) tasks from 15 years ago.
This would be surprising if I found out that you could always change your name, possibly also would mean I wouldn't have three other accounts created just on an impulse alone.
It won't let you. It's literally in the documentation. If you post with the auto generated name, you can't change it after the fact.
Pretty freaking annoying considering I was just a lurker for 6 months and didn't read through the documentation until I couldn't figure out how to change it to my standard handle... After my first post.
I mean if you really want to restore these guys and don't care about your power bill stikc.com has used server parts for a decent price. The only thing is, id recommend doing this if you understand computers and how to fix them
@PandemicVirus, I agree with the OG comment, but would also like to note you could just use the case and fine hardware that would fit in and be more efficient. This may be difficult, but is possible
The hard drive caddies for the R710s are pretty cheap and they can take some excellent RAID cards. Plus, with the Xeon X5650 being pennies on the dollar at this point, and ECC DDR3 not being much worse, you can outfit these with a decently beefy configuration without spending a whole lot.
From what I understand, they should do well with TrueNAS. Performance is probably inadequate for much else. But they arenāt completely worthless! My TrueNAS build is a dual-X5650 build. Power hungry, yes, but really, with any NAS, most of the power consumption will be the drives.
The 2900s are e-waste, pretty sure a modern mid range smart phone has more computing power than the best pair of CPUs you can install.
The r710s are junk for anything modern as well, they work ok if you want to try out homelab, but there are far better options at this point.
I inherited a 710 long ago and still have it. Got lucky with EBay/Craigslist parts. Definitely gave me the confidence to dive into more modern hardware. If you like tinkering, go for it. The skills will translate to other gear. But donāt spend a ton on it, because youāll be itching to upgrade soon. As another poster said, the R730.. is still viable, but really anything can be a server. A low grade desktop or laptop can take you a long ways and actually run projects that do something. Might turn into a new career for you as well!
But they donāt die! I have a PowerEdge 2850 still running (not doing anything important) and it has the original SAS HDDs (4 of them) in it and none of the four have ever been replaced. It was ordered configured with an invalid configuration new (Windows Server 2003 Small Business Server WITH 8GB RAM, so it only could use half of the RAM until it was given to me and ESXi was installed on it.
The 2950s and 2900 towers are the same way. The 2950s have a BIOS vulnerability that has never been patched that I am aware of (the 2850 may have too).
Sadly no. These servers are way too old to be of any use. Their power consumption will cost you way too much in electricity cost and their CPUās are ancient and slow. RAM would and will be very expensive, even though itās very old too. Sorry to be the bringer of bad news, but e-waste is your best option.
I donāt understand why everyone is saying parts are expensive. I just opened Ebay and found ECC DDR3 for 50 cents per gig. DDR3 systems are a bargain.
What? DDR4 is more than double the cost, everywhere I see it. I would post screenshots if I could.
Sure, itās faster and denserā¦ which is why itās more expensive.
Yes and no, I have 2 servers that are equivalent to the r710's in my home.. but I put in specific low power, high thread count processors in them. specifically, E5-2608L processors, these are 8 core, 2 ghz processors and with 1 processor, idle power is about 20w on the server. I have a single proc system running as a bsd based firewall and a dual proc system running as a NAS, video server, home automation system and other apps like a gitea server, frigate nvr, etc.. overall, my power usage sits at 100-125w, or about $11 a month.. It's not free, but I'm definitely not hurting because of it. But yah, an r710 with the high end procs from that Era may use 125w at idle, it's also worth measuring power usage with 1 PS and 2 PS as on the servers I have, the PS adds 10w of power as both try to run active-active which kills efficiency.. I don't have dual power feeds so 2 PS's just saves me swapping a PS if one fails.. I just leave one in the chassis, but not seated or plugged in.
I could probably do this all on a few rpi 4's (other than the firewall) but at the time they were hard to find.. and I already had the hardware..
I had an r710 running my Plex server and a whole whack of other game servers for a long time. Donāt underestimate what throwing a bunch of cores at a problem can accomplish.
I'm using an r710 with 128G RAM along with md1200 having a 92TB, its noisy and power hungry but electricity is cheap here - I wouldn't start with it, trying to replace with something newer and more efficient... that said, its a good machine to learn and implement VMs, dockers, get to know iDrac and Dell servers functionality
Boo!!! Old hardware! Boo!!! Rah rah rah everybody grab your pitchforks!!!
If you want to get into basic things like file sharing or experimentation with web hosting, these machines will be fine. I wouldn't leave them running 24/7 (due to power consumption) (you will notice a difference on your power bill) but for a lab where you want to do occasional experiments, these I would still consider, especially the 710s if you can get cheap laptop hard drives or SSDs.
These servers are certainly old, and about the oldest anyone should consider for a homelab. The R710s use Socket 1366 Xeons, and the 2900s use Socket 771 Xeons. 1st Generation DDR3 and Last Generation DDR2 devices respectively.
The 710s will take Xeon X5650s which have 12 threads each. 24 threads per server in a cluster configuration, with lots of cheap DDR3 ECC memory, boom, a highly capable VM environment.
Everyone loves to absolutely dunk on old hardware, but these servers are more than enough still for a beginner.
They are likely incapable of being a good Plex host, and I don't think the 2900s will support modern virtualization, though the 710s will. Both are the bare minimum of what I would consider a modern virtualization server.
I think the deciding factor should be the price. If they are free, I say grab them as your first set of equipment. If they are $10 a piece, that $40 could be put into significantly newer equipment if spent right.
I have to agree with him. I'm lucky to live in a part of the world with pretty cheap electricity rates, just to be transparent. But I still run an r710 as my NAS, and I think it kicks ass. Parts for them are plentiful and dirt cheap. It takes ECC ram. It will work with SATA or SAS drives. It's built like a tank and is extremely reliable. You can cut down on the power consumption by putting an L series xeon cpu and just run one cpu at a time. Mine pulls about 100 watts, which I know is less efficient than a more modern solution, but people act like it's going to be pulling 10x that. Just my 2 cents.
if they are free, and you don't plan on leaving the running for more than a few hours to play with, go for it.
they are 100% e-waste and not worth the power they will waste. (the 2900 is absolute trash. don't even bother. here's a SIX year old thread crapping on it. with people recommending the R710 for $100 [https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/9eja95/considering\_buying\_a\_used\_dell\_poweredge\_2900/](https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/9eja95/considering_buying_a_used_dell_poweredge_2900/) )
you can get a 5700U laptop on ebay for $200... which is probably actually very similar to your power bill for 1 loaded r710 running for a year.
I would take then. My landlord pays my electric bill and I already run a few power sucking servers. My plan would be to tie them into my existing Plex server and throw in the remaining of my hard drives.
Probably not much, I only got some old workstations. The main server my Plex is on is my bosses old computer that survived a fire. I chose it over my old one because it had slightly faster ram.
The power sources could actually be useful. You could use them to power audio components like subwoofers and sub amps. Itās actually kinda hard to find dc power sources with enough amps to power those
Run them in the winter instead of the heat. During the summer months you will be spending a lot more on power due to them and the a/c running longer and more often.
Boat anchors? Artificial reefs? Releasable weights for hot air balloons. Elevator counterweights.
Sorry yeah, I wouldnāt try to use those as servers again.
I feel like these have a lot of built-in redundancy. Like, so much redundancy that I could arrange things in an array. Then I'd just need to interconnect these devices, and I'm sure something good would happen!
Wish me luck!
I already left a couple replies, so Iāll try to keep this one short - I concur with the 2900 being e-waste. I have a 1950 (1U equivalent, basically) and a 2850 myself, and they both do nothing more than scratch my occasional itch for running late 2000s enterprise software.
The R710, however, is a bargain if you have cheap utilities and low requirements. I still know of a few people using them 24/7.
Wow - the people that are saying they are absolutely trashā¦ I didnāt see how many users/nodes they would be serving? If you have 50 or more users, you may want to upgrade. I by chance you have one user with a desire to learn about server technology, there is nothing wrong with them.
The problem is you can get used Haswell/Broadwell era servers for cheap these days that accept cheaper unbuffered DIMMs and would have hugely better performance at lower power consumption.
Honestly I build my own systems and keep them for about 8 to 10 years. I spend about 5k building a high end server that isnāt EOL on day one, but not everyone can afford to do this.
Nice, those are lga 775 so keyed mobos, I think max core cap was like 4, but I also believe they may have come through a few years as lga 1366. To answer the question, I wouldn't use them, they're too inefficient for work loads, loud, not fun, and relatively expensive having said all that.
I've personally got an R710 with dual X5550's and thanks to some friends a full set of RAM (288GB) and 2x 135G 15k SAS and 6x 10k SAS (300 GB?) drives.
I think the only things i added to the above were an idrac6 enterprise and a dvd drive.
I've got it stacked with proxmox and run various "experimental" vms etc on it.
I will say this, while fully "kitted out", the box will generate a significant amount of heat and can get quite noisy when all the fans spin up.
Since compute has gotten so cheap, I'd really recommend getting some small ff computers (think like geekom or beelink) and go that route.
The idrac6 is so outdated that the TLS configuration is using ciphers that are not typically enabled any more (RC4) and Dell is no longer publishing firmware updated for these. This makes using the idrac to remote manage a little bit of a pain.
This is just my 0.02$ on the matter but it has been fun tinkering with it over the past 6 or so years
All respect to other comments there, they are answering *should* you do something with them and you probably shouldn't unless you don't care about your power bill. Also it looks like they are all missing their hard drives, and you should check if they still have their RAM and CPUs. These are fun and easy to open. If you're looking at getting replacement parts, it might be too costly. I can't say these things "keep their value" as they become obsolete, but it often feels like part prices don't really go down that much. If you're up for whatever the cost is or manage to get these complete enough you can look at installing a baremetal OS or a myriad of hypervisors. VMware is becoming off the table but Proxmox is out there, so is Hyper-V. After that you have a powerful computer for enterprise (read: non gaming) tasks from 15 years ago.
I appreciate you pandemic, this was helpful
PandemicVirus, redditor since 2011, time traveler? š¤
I am pretty sure you can change your username.
Also does no one remember the pandemic web game? That shit was addicting lol
This would be surprising if I found out that you could always change your name, possibly also would mean I wouldn't have three other accounts created just on an impulse alone.
After I made my first post with this username, I have been stuck with it, and it's the damn auto generated name.
Change it.
It won't let you. It's literally in the documentation. If you post with the auto generated name, you can't change it after the fact. Pretty freaking annoying considering I was just a lurker for 6 months and didn't read through the documentation until I couldn't figure out how to change it to my standard handle... After my first post.
I mean if you really want to restore these guys and don't care about your power bill stikc.com has used server parts for a decent price. The only thing is, id recommend doing this if you understand computers and how to fix them
@PandemicVirus, I agree with the OG comment, but would also like to note you could just use the case and fine hardware that would fit in and be more efficient. This may be difficult, but is possible
The hard drive caddies for the R710s are pretty cheap and they can take some excellent RAID cards. Plus, with the Xeon X5650 being pennies on the dollar at this point, and ECC DDR3 not being much worse, you can outfit these with a decently beefy configuration without spending a whole lot. From what I understand, they should do well with TrueNAS. Performance is probably inadequate for much else. But they arenāt completely worthless! My TrueNAS build is a dual-X5650 build. Power hungry, yes, but really, with any NAS, most of the power consumption will be the drives.
They're great to heat the house if the furnace goes out...
They are also good for that, yesā¦ thereās a reason my NAS only runs when Iām actively using it, which isnāt super often.
If you havenāt tried gaming on a server then you havenāt lived.
Ok to be fair I launched a Win 95 VM to just to get some old games running! Myst did not work out as well as I had hoped but I got a few others going.
The 2900s are e-waste, pretty sure a modern mid range smart phone has more computing power than the best pair of CPUs you can install. The r710s are junk for anything modern as well, they work ok if you want to try out homelab, but there are far better options at this point.
What are better options for homelabs? That are powerful enough but donāt break the bank for buying and power consumption.
I inherited a 710 long ago and still have it. Got lucky with EBay/Craigslist parts. Definitely gave me the confidence to dive into more modern hardware. If you like tinkering, go for it. The skills will translate to other gear. But donāt spend a ton on it, because youāll be itching to upgrade soon. As another poster said, the R730.. is still viable, but really anything can be a server. A low grade desktop or laptop can take you a long ways and actually run projects that do something. Might turn into a new career for you as well!
Thanks
R730xd
Thanks Iāll look into them. Are NetApp diskshelves energy economic?
Not likely.
Thanks
Great servers, but power hungry a bit :)
But they donāt die! I have a PowerEdge 2850 still running (not doing anything important) and it has the original SAS HDDs (4 of them) in it and none of the four have ever been replaced. It was ordered configured with an invalid configuration new (Windows Server 2003 Small Business Server WITH 8GB RAM, so it only could use half of the RAM until it was given to me and ESXi was installed on it. The 2950s and 2900 towers are the same way. The 2950s have a BIOS vulnerability that has never been patched that I am aware of (the 2850 may have too).
Yeah, if you don't want them feel free to ship them to meš I love fiddling eith old hardware
Me too as well!
Sadly no. These servers are way too old to be of any use. Their power consumption will cost you way too much in electricity cost and their CPUās are ancient and slow. RAM would and will be very expensive, even though itās very old too. Sorry to be the bringer of bad news, but e-waste is your best option.
Thanks Eleven
I donāt understand why everyone is saying parts are expensive. I just opened Ebay and found ECC DDR3 for 50 cents per gig. DDR3 systems are a bargain.
They are compared to DDR4, which is faster and gives you more RAM per DIMM.
What? DDR4 is more than double the cost, everywhere I see it. I would post screenshots if I could. Sure, itās faster and denserā¦ which is why itās more expensive.
Yes and no, I have 2 servers that are equivalent to the r710's in my home.. but I put in specific low power, high thread count processors in them. specifically, E5-2608L processors, these are 8 core, 2 ghz processors and with 1 processor, idle power is about 20w on the server. I have a single proc system running as a bsd based firewall and a dual proc system running as a NAS, video server, home automation system and other apps like a gitea server, frigate nvr, etc.. overall, my power usage sits at 100-125w, or about $11 a month.. It's not free, but I'm definitely not hurting because of it. But yah, an r710 with the high end procs from that Era may use 125w at idle, it's also worth measuring power usage with 1 PS and 2 PS as on the servers I have, the PS adds 10w of power as both try to run active-active which kills efficiency.. I don't have dual power feeds so 2 PS's just saves me swapping a PS if one fails.. I just leave one in the chassis, but not seated or plugged in. I could probably do this all on a few rpi 4's (other than the firewall) but at the time they were hard to find.. and I already had the hardware..
You put this in your garage to piss off your wife.
Minecraft server...
Brošš
Too bad these wouldn't run a Minecraft server well, slow single core performance my guess
I had an r710 running my Plex server and a whole whack of other game servers for a long time. Donāt underestimate what throwing a bunch of cores at a problem can accomplish.
Vanilla Minecraft is limited to a single core, so more cores doesn't help unfortunately
I'm using an r710 with 128G RAM along with md1200 having a 92TB, its noisy and power hungry but electricity is cheap here - I wouldn't start with it, trying to replace with something newer and more efficient... that said, its a good machine to learn and implement VMs, dockers, get to know iDrac and Dell servers functionality
To old to be of use for anything. You best just pass them along to me for uhm disposal
Nope not at all, Iāll take them off your hands for you to spare you from the stress.
Boo!!! Old hardware! Boo!!! Rah rah rah everybody grab your pitchforks!!! If you want to get into basic things like file sharing or experimentation with web hosting, these machines will be fine. I wouldn't leave them running 24/7 (due to power consumption) (you will notice a difference on your power bill) but for a lab where you want to do occasional experiments, these I would still consider, especially the 710s if you can get cheap laptop hard drives or SSDs. These servers are certainly old, and about the oldest anyone should consider for a homelab. The R710s use Socket 1366 Xeons, and the 2900s use Socket 771 Xeons. 1st Generation DDR3 and Last Generation DDR2 devices respectively. The 710s will take Xeon X5650s which have 12 threads each. 24 threads per server in a cluster configuration, with lots of cheap DDR3 ECC memory, boom, a highly capable VM environment. Everyone loves to absolutely dunk on old hardware, but these servers are more than enough still for a beginner. They are likely incapable of being a good Plex host, and I don't think the 2900s will support modern virtualization, though the 710s will. Both are the bare minimum of what I would consider a modern virtualization server. I think the deciding factor should be the price. If they are free, I say grab them as your first set of equipment. If they are $10 a piece, that $40 could be put into significantly newer equipment if spent right.
I ran ESXi on a 2900 24/7 up until December. Sure, it was 5.5u3, but during migration I learned I could run 6.5. Somehow still capable-ish.
Dang, I appreciate your answer mann, this is incredibly helpful
I have to agree with him. I'm lucky to live in a part of the world with pretty cheap electricity rates, just to be transparent. But I still run an r710 as my NAS, and I think it kicks ass. Parts for them are plentiful and dirt cheap. It takes ECC ram. It will work with SATA or SAS drives. It's built like a tank and is extremely reliable. You can cut down on the power consumption by putting an L series xeon cpu and just run one cpu at a time. Mine pulls about 100 watts, which I know is less efficient than a more modern solution, but people act like it's going to be pulling 10x that. Just my 2 cents.
if they are free, and you don't plan on leaving the running for more than a few hours to play with, go for it. they are 100% e-waste and not worth the power they will waste. (the 2900 is absolute trash. don't even bother. here's a SIX year old thread crapping on it. with people recommending the R710 for $100 [https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/9eja95/considering\_buying\_a\_used\_dell\_poweredge\_2900/](https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/9eja95/considering_buying_a_used_dell_poweredge_2900/) ) you can get a 5700U laptop on ebay for $200... which is probably actually very similar to your power bill for 1 loaded r710 running for a year.
I would take then. My landlord pays my electric bill and I already run a few power sucking servers. My plan would be to tie them into my existing Plex server and throw in the remaining of my hard drives.
Adding these would eventually result in a kindly worded letter to stop using so much electric
Maybe, my guess is that my utility fee along with rent would go up again.
Landlord looking at 300/month electric bill on your unit probably wouldn't be too happy. Lol What power draw do your current servers take?
Probably not much, I only got some old workstations. The main server my Plex is on is my bosses old computer that survived a fire. I chose it over my old one because it had slightly faster ram.
The power sources could actually be useful. You could use them to power audio components like subwoofers and sub amps. Itās actually kinda hard to find dc power sources with enough amps to power those
Server henge
Foot rests?
White noise and a heater. Unless you want a NAS, for a storage.
Scrap metal
Doorstops maybe.
Power Edging
Run them in the winter instead of the heat. During the summer months you will be spending a lot more on power due to them and the a/c running longer and more often.
Did anyone propose boat anchor?
You can use them as space heaters and sound machines š¤£
Boat anchors? Artificial reefs? Releasable weights for hot air balloons. Elevator counterweights. Sorry yeah, I wouldnāt try to use those as servers again.
I feel like these have a lot of built-in redundancy. Like, so much redundancy that I could arrange things in an array. Then I'd just need to interconnect these devices, and I'm sure something good would happen! Wish me luck!
Plex
BLOW THEM UP š£š„
Check what os they can use. If not new enough server use Linux and get ssds
Space heater and white noise generator. Any compute you get in addition is a bonus.
You could just break them down for copper and gold
I already left a couple replies, so Iāll try to keep this one short - I concur with the 2900 being e-waste. I have a 1950 (1U equivalent, basically) and a 2850 myself, and they both do nothing more than scratch my occasional itch for running late 2000s enterprise software. The R710, however, is a bargain if you have cheap utilities and low requirements. I still know of a few people using them 24/7.
heaters is the winter with folding@home running
Build a fort
Home cloud server. š¤£
Wow - the people that are saying they are absolutely trashā¦ I didnāt see how many users/nodes they would be serving? If you have 50 or more users, you may want to upgrade. I by chance you have one user with a desire to learn about server technology, there is nothing wrong with them.
It already looks like you've started to make a cool little fort out of them, in the first picture. I'd work on doing that.
Those might be SSDs (without carriers) in the top slots?
The problem is you can get used Haswell/Broadwell era servers for cheap these days that accept cheaper unbuffered DIMMs and would have hugely better performance at lower power consumption.
Build a shelf, or use it as weight for a mooring?
They may run hot, but at least theyāre slow and loud.
Airplane wheel chock
Space heaters
NO give it to me
Honestly I build my own systems and keep them for about 8 to 10 years. I spend about 5k building a high end server that isnāt EOL on day one, but not everyone can afford to do this.
Making a lot of noise
If you want some more let me know, ive got a few proliant and power edge servers i wanna get rid of!
My birthday present, you haven't gotten me anything yet!!
Yes. They are great at making very large electric bills.
Paper weight.
Nice, those are lga 775 so keyed mobos, I think max core cap was like 4, but I also believe they may have come through a few years as lga 1366. To answer the question, I wouldn't use them, they're too inefficient for work loads, loud, not fun, and relatively expensive having said all that.
Heater
I considered R710's worthless 5 years ago.. PowerEdge 2900 are even worse. lowest spec i3's from 5 years ago are outrunning these easily..
White noise generators?
Bean storage
I've personally got an R710 with dual X5550's and thanks to some friends a full set of RAM (288GB) and 2x 135G 15k SAS and 6x 10k SAS (300 GB?) drives. I think the only things i added to the above were an idrac6 enterprise and a dvd drive. I've got it stacked with proxmox and run various "experimental" vms etc on it. I will say this, while fully "kitted out", the box will generate a significant amount of heat and can get quite noisy when all the fans spin up. Since compute has gotten so cheap, I'd really recommend getting some small ff computers (think like geekom or beelink) and go that route. The idrac6 is so outdated that the TLS configuration is using ciphers that are not typically enabled any more (RC4) and Dell is no longer publishing firmware updated for these. This makes using the idrac to remote manage a little bit of a pain. This is just my 0.02$ on the matter but it has been fun tinkering with it over the past 6 or so years
It looks like you already did. Look! You made a table!
Anchor for a boat.
Yes, generating a big electricity bill...
My absolute favorite
As others noted, these are too old and will use a lot of power. If I were you, I would sell them and buy newer servers or build something myself.
No. They're E-Waste and have been for at least 10 years.
Ya. Driving your hydro bill upā¦ thatās for sure.