Continuation on
I wonder what’s the power draw on that, without drives?
Jesus christ, a 960! I can’t think of the last time I saw nehalem in production. That’s well over 15 years at this point! At least jump to something like a xeon L5530. They’re next to free on eBay, and it will greatl reduce your power consumption.
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Indeed, if you pay for electricity, it’s much cheaper to buy any, including new, power efficient server, than to run “free” old garbage nobody wants. Guess why nobody wants it? Because that free stuff gets extremely expensive very fast.
Electricity costs me $.50/kwh. 200watt sever therefore costs $900/year to run. Maybe $400 is cost of running disks and the rest attributable to old cpu, old chipset, old PSU, old sas cards.
I could instead buy a new arm based sever for, say, $2000 and it will break even after 4 years. It will be pure cost savings after that for decades to come.
For even more cost savings I’m thinking Mac mini + Thunderbolt sas enclosure. I’m not sure if FreeBSD can be installed on a Mac. I need to play with it.
As a quick fix — supermicro sells low power boards with on-board CPU and all the periphery (I system uses some for their low end tenses). They cost about $1k, and will pay for themselves in a year.
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Wow, that is more than 3x what I pay and more than 5x what others pay in some states.
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Indeed! I am lucky enough to be paying £0.07/KWh for my power as this is an off-peak rate that I use to charge my home batteries which power the house during the day.
Electricity prices have gone crazy in some European countries too.
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arrogantrabbit buys purrified current, triple filtered, not the crap that others receive.
That’s why he pays a premium price.
Even the electric cables from the pole are golden, not the cheap copper or aluminum ones.
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Premium electrons. I wish we had those here… 
Welp here in Germany the price is around 0.37€/kWh or if you operate in a datacenter the price would be around 0,5-0,6€/kWh.
I too have to pay about 0.4€/kWh
Should have kept those nukes running… #justsaying 
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No, please don’t ignite nukes in Germany😱
Reactors are a quite expense solution. Better to boost renewable engery
They’re already built!
I’d rather have something that’s dirt cheap to run, has no direct emissions and outputs reliably until we crack the Renewables storage conundrum.
Shutting down the nukes in Germany was such breathtaking short sightedness that I cannot believe Germany actually did it.
How are those replacement coal plants working out? 
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Yeah if MS can restore Three Mile Island… Germany can restart their plants: they’re probably still warm…
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The coal being burnt is Germany is some of the worst type for pollution.
Now in the US we are also working in micro reactors, far safer, more affordable and portable. Ideal for new data centers.
Example: https://nanonuclearenergy.com/
SMRs (small modular reactors) are really interesting as a concept. I do hope they make it to commercial viability, their uses and possibilities are very exciting especially for isolated communities who often rely on oil-fired generators (islands like the Balearic come to mind).
And then there may be Thorium molten salt reactors in the not-so-distant future.
I do hope we manage to make up for the 40 years of lost nuclear technology development…
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I’m in San Diego CA which is doing a good job trying to have the most expensive electricity in the US. During peak times in the summer it’s over 67 cents per kwh, and over 40 cents during most other times, and only gets cheaper at midnight.
link to those supermicros.
please
Nah, it could do better, there is room for improvement :). We lived in San Diego for almost six years. SDGE has a long way to go to match PGE
Here, for everyone to gloat and to feel smug about their reasonable energy provider. https://www.pge.com/content/dam/pge/docs/account/rate-plans/residential-electric-rate-plan-pricing.pdf
Here is one
https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/motherboard/a2sdi-h-tf
And the whole lineup: type “A2SDI” into search here:
Actually no. And producing these components, like solar panels, wind generators, all needed electronics, including batteries is a very polluting the environment. It’s also requires a service for each such device or a replacement on a regular basis. The atomic energy would be much greener and cheaper in that case unfortunately. You may google research on this topic.
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Good move, Alexey 
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