6 servers were decomissioned, Iwas able to only get the disks, RAM, CPUs and Network Card.
The total of this is : 88 x 8TB SAS disks 44 x 16GB RAM sticks (half 2133, half 2400) 6 x v3 Xeon e3 2630 6 x v4 Xeon e5 2640 3 x 10 GB PCIe dual port cards 12 x 1U heatsink
I’m really lucky to have all of these, even if I don’t have a use for all of that for now (except some of the disks)
EDIT: Forgot to mention: All of this for free, I work in a datacenter!
Sheeeeeiiiiiitt
God damn I’m jealous.
I’ve been jealous of people, same as you, now it’s my turn to shine! Your turn will come!
Me too. I thought these would be a bunch of 1TB HDDs but OP blew us away with them being 8TB.
Honestly, 88 1TB drives would make me envious too.
All in the game.
I’m not, but I am envious. Happy for OP though.
88 x 8TB drives? 704 TB of storage?
You got a whole damn data center lol. Good stuff dude. Was this off of ebay or direct from a company? I’m curious to know the total cost.
Oh yeah, forgot to mention: All of this for free at my work, I work in a datacenter!
Somewhere, an ISO27001 auditor’s jimmies started rustling.
Do you think it’s possible for old decommissioned drives to be donated in a compliant manner?
Reference for others:
ISO/IEC 27001 is an international standard to manage information security. … It details requirements for establishing, implementing, maintaining and continually improving an information security management system (ISMS) – the aim of which is to help organizations make the information assets they hold more secure. Organizations that meet the standard’s requirements can choose to be certified by an accredited certification body following successful completion of an audit.
It certainly is. ISO 27001 is a framework, not very prescriptive at all. Basically an auditor will ask “how do you ensure data isn’t leaving your facility in the form of discarded hardware?” If you say “here’s a link to our media destruction policy. It says all drives are wiped according to NIST 800-88 cryptographic erasure. If that is not possible or not applicable, the drive is destroyed. Here’s our log of decomissioned equipment” chances are very good they’ll say “OK great let’s move on to the next one” with only minor followup questions.
👏
I recognize there’s a likelihood you are usually being paid for answers like that. Thank you for satisfying my curiosity for free :)
Absolutely, and it’s usually up to the organization disposing of the drives to set and document the standard by which they abide.
Thanks :)
Well now im very jealous lol. Good for you man, thats a banger deal.
My Jellyfin is also running media from recycled HDDs from work. No where near this impressive haul, but it was nice to be able to get a solid 10 TBs for free to get my server going.
My server got updated a lot, starting with a single 1 TB disk, the a single 4TB disk, to 6 4tb disks and now it will be 10 8TB disks
That, is a pretty good deal. Better start picking up some MD1200s!
I have my eyes on some fiber channel stuff that got decomissionned, I’ll probably try something with that
You lucky bastard, respectfully.
You mean fucking sonobabich right? Respectfully ofcourse.
That mother fucker! respectfully as fuck.
Nice haul! I hope you also managed to get the small power plant for the drives. That’s not going to be pretty.
that’s true ahah
Just a heads up, trying to buy Uranium for the reactor on Ebay will get you in trouble real fast, so be careful!
Everyone knows you need to harvest it from smoke detectors like the Nuclear
EagleBoy Scout did.David Charles Hahn (October 30, 1976 – September 27, 2016), sometimes called the “Radioactive Boy Scout” and the “Nuclear Boy Scout” was an American nuclear radiation enthusiast who built a homemade neutron source at the age of seventeen.
Sad read, poor guy.
Never thought I’d read someone:
attained Eagle Scout rank shortly after his lab was dismantled.
Sad that he died in 2016.
deleted by creator
Too young.
deleted by creator
You just need your mom to date someone that works at a secret government base, “borrow” their badge, swap the uranium with dish soap, and good to go.
How’s my mom gonna have time for that when she’s busy with every male COD player ever?
Who plays COD nowadays ?
There’s anything else? 😁
NileRed? Is that you?
Would something that can switch on and off the drives as needed be bad for them? A small bit of lag could be worth it if they really would take that much to power
Drives do this on their own.
And RAID hardware and software do too - this can be a problem with some drives (I always forget which ones, WD black? Or is it the reds? I’m almost positive Greens are not recommended for RAID arrays)
I also work in a data center, I can’t take anything :(
We have a hard drive degausser and shredder. Lucky bastard taking things home
Yep yep, same. Old droves get destroyed. My word that I’ll wipe the drive is apparently not enough.
For security, yes, your word is not enough. This would be confidentiality in the CIA triad. I still understand your disappointment seeing probably many dozens of drives get destroyed. I get the majority of drives by scrapping old PC and it pains me to see what people will throw out.
CIA triad (confidentiality, integrity and availability)
TIL
Having a reliable drive erasing setup on site is not a thing? That sounds economically better to me
It’s not as secure as simply destroying a drive.
And it’s not like you’re going to reuse the drives internally - if you were, there’s no issue - reformat and move on. But that doesn’t really happen either - each project has accounting, and it’s more effort to adjust the accounting, plus the risk of moving a used drive.
Risk really drives a lot of enterprise stuff. Good way to lose your job is to accept risks, especially ones like this that can be completely mitigated by simply destroying drives. That money has been amortized/allocated already, so it’s a much better value than the risk.
Gotta issue them a NIST 800-88 certificate and you’re golden.
Yeah does anyone else wonder if this screams of incompetence from upper management? OP was ONLY able to get the disks, RAM, CPUs and Network Card. Sounds like someone higher up gave the “ok” just thinking the “Server” frame was the important part security wise. It would be an interesting scenario to see if the data center was able to upgrade the system while keeping all of the base components compatible and everything under cost or if this was just a screw up.
I thought I was living large with my two 12tb drives I bought for $86 each lol.
Damn, where’d you find that deal?
Probably here : https://serverpartdeals.com/collections/hard-drives They sold 18TB drives for 100€ last months
I was almost crying while looking for drives to increase the storage space of my current 10TB drives in my UnRaid, because of the price.
You will now be known as “the tears-Minator”.
Thank you so much for this link.
Keep in mind they are refurbished tho! They will work fine, but they also have a lot of hours on them too!
But you’re welcome! They do offer some sweet deals!
I tend to replace my drives (if $$$ permits) every 2 to 3 years unless one of them fails before that. And seeing as they are willing to give 2 years of warranty on some of those renewed drives, I’m not really that concerned.
I am, however, buying 2 brand new 20TB drives for parity, which would be my biggest concern. On top of that, I have a mirror of my server in my brother’s house over 2K miles away (beats paying cloud failover, for sure).
Holy shit dude. You can take like a quarter of that and make an absolutely silly system, and make a decent chunk of change selling the rest.
That electric bill, though. 🤣
And never watching anything 😂
and the partner still prefers Netflix, because they hate to think what they want to watch
Lol.
There’s a feature in Kodi to play random stuff from a selection.
Where do you live that power is so cheap that you can spin that much rust and also can you run extension lead to my place?
I’ve found the disks hurt my power less than choosing a good motherboard/cpu, and using M2 for the OS drive.
Using it drives up power. At idle, my latest 5-drive setup draws 20 watts, it goes up when I’m copying files to it (usually syncing media files from 2 other local storages).
Compared to my old system which was an ancient gaming rig that drew 120w at idle, with only 2 drives (OS and storage).
I also have a 5 disk NAS running some old drives, it’s idle power is so low I’ve forgotten - maybe 15w? The most it could potentially draw is about 60w, since that’s the power supply max - I’ve seen it draw 45w while rebuilding a disk.
At idle, my latest 5-drive setup draws 20 watts
That’s super low. What drives do you have? Are your drives spinning down?
It’s a mix of crap I’ve acquired over the years, all 1TB drives, 3.5",most 5-10 years old, in an old Drobo I inherited. Yea, it’s a massive risk, but it’s one of 3 storage systems replicating data locally, plus a Crashplan backup.
Since it’s 5 drives, I’m pretty sure it spins them down - at best if they drew 3w each, it’d be 15w in drives alone.
Running it on a smart switch, I’ve never seen it draw more than 30w, and that’s at boot time with 5 drives.
My 3-drive Proxmox box (a Dell SFF) drives are a mix of spinning metal and SSD (2.5"), it idles about 20w, peaks at 100w when I’m converting video files with a VM. That hardware is about 5 years old too, 32gb of ram, booting from an M2 drive.
My use-case is very high idle time (95%+?), so I’m targeting lowest idle power consumption. Pretty much anything will suck power once I’m doing anything heavy (like video conversion).
How much (ballpark) power is this using a day or month?
With great power…
…bill?
I’m super jealous. Whenever we decom servers at work, we’re required to fill out paperwork and provide proof that all HDDs and SSDs were properly destroyed (i.e. rendered completely unusable and wiped) and turned in to our disposal department. The servers themselves also have to be handed over to them. I’m not sure what they do with the servers, but I’m guessing they either repurpose them as emergency replacements for other sites that have hardware failures or they bulk sell them at auctions or something.
Yeah… that sucks, but then they’ll tell you about green IT and stuff, but they just throw away and destroy stuff that could be used elsewhere…
It’s an IP issue. Nobody wants to be the one responsible for leaking someone’s proprietary design or PII just to make a little bit of cash from selling used drives. My work has 55 gallon drums with a slot on top to dispose of hard drives for this same reason.
Drives, I understand but servers tho…
eWaste. We have a contract to give an outside company all our stuff. We degauss and shred hard drives and everything else does in a big bin that they pickup every month.
SSDs were properly destroyed
I hate when companies do this, SSDs do not need to be shredded, there’s no security benefit whatsoever. You don’t even need to do the whole “write 0s/random data X times” like with HDDs. So damn wasteful ugh.
(Assuming SATA) some people get away with drilling a hole in the half opposite the connector, the actual chip is like 1/4th the size of the drive casing. M.2 form factor is just screwed though.
Our SSDs just have to be wiped but we still have to document and provide proof they were wiped and turned in. HDDs and tapes are a different story and a pain in the ass, though.
I assume they’re past some operational limit. But as long as you have redundancy that’s a risk I’d take for the capacity
With 88 disks, some RAID 5 I think I’m going to be okey if one of them fails! (I also have a backup server)
I mean if you wanna spare 2 or 3 I know a guy
come and get them!
Hard to tell if this is a proposal to fight over hardware or an offer for free stuff.
I choose to believe the former because it makes me chuckle more.
Let’s just make an arena where the nerds fight to win a disk!
“Ugh, now they’re both crying…” Covers microphone “Someone hit somebody! God, in my 13 years of UFC announcing, I’ve never been more embarrassed…”
“What is this one doing??? Is he… what’s this weird Arch logo on his laptop”
Where are you located? I’m in need of some new backup drives and would be happy to pay a reasonable price + shipping if you’re interested.
I’m in France, however I’ll not sell them immediately, maybe you could check serverpartsdeals to get some cheap refurbished drives
I happen to be in France this summer :P
But I should probably get my backup server set up before that…
Hope you have fun with those drives!
Go RAID 6 and save some disks for backups.
The RAID rebuild time is going to be longer than the OEM warranty… love it!
If you’d like to sell a couple of drivers and you’re in Europe, contact me.
88 × 8 Tb? Archive the internet archives.
If the internet archive wants some, I’d love to give some to them ahah
But I’m already archiving a lot of stuff, from Youtube, ISO, and more!
Shared your comment with them ([email protected]) - you’re awesome!
