Hardware For Sale/Trade

jan-jaap wrote: I think the problem is more that a dirty system is best left undisturbed because once you pull the thing apart the dust goes everywhere, including the compression connectors

Onyx2 is not a piece of cake, not a walk to disassemble, I understand, IP30 takes 4 houses for that (disassembly the PSU, all the coolers, front plane, and cleaning them carefully), but i think the dust problem hits us if systems are carefully careless. i often clean my machines, before disassembling I use to blow air compress, setted to "caress", strong enough to let the dust to go away, and so the dues does, it goes away, for the most.

but personally i had troubles only with the PCI cartridge, and air compress has reached the purpose.

jan-jaap wrote:
I usually don't keep PC hardware around long enough to compare it to my SGI's in terms of reliability. It's easy to complain about the (un)reliability of the PSU of a 1990 vintage 4D PowerSeries, but the truth is I have no idea whether a PC from that era would still work because I just don't have them. My experience with 'PC' server hardware is quite good as far as reliability goes, but I use Tyan or Supermicro boards, Xeon CPUs and ECC memory, and I retire them after ~ 5 years, before they fail. My current PC workstation is an HP Z600 with two hexacore Xeons and 48GB RAM -- best PC I ever saw. Side panels in solid aluminum, sounds like a vault door when you close them.

This is a very interesting discussion and I think that you really have a very valid point here. I know that we tend to mock Dells and many other PCs from particular vendors but in my hands they are super-reliable work-horses. My workstation in the lab is still a Dell T5400 from 2008 and it has been working 24/7 since we bought it, only stopping for the upgrades. It is a rock-solid machine and still quite fast for today standards. The same is true for many other old Dells, like the Optiplex 745 or 755 we have here, that have been silently working for many many years in a dark corner full of dust. I could say the same of the HPs or the Lenovos. I am running a cluster of many little Quad Core M57P Lenovos with 8Gb of RAM per unit and they have been performing flawlessly for years and years. My O2 has never failed, but I would not dare to let her ON for such a long time .

[[C|-|E]] wrote:

jan-jaap wrote:
I usually don't keep PC hardware around long enough to compare it to my SGI's in terms of reliability. It's easy to complain about the (un)reliability of the PSU of a 1990 vintage 4D PowerSeries, but the truth is I have no idea whether a PC from that era would still work because I just don't have them. My experience with 'PC' server hardware is quite good as far as reliability goes, but I use Tyan or Supermicro boards, Xeon CPUs and ECC memory, and I retire them after ~ 5 years, before they fail. My current PC workstation is an HP Z600 with two hexacore Xeons and 48GB RAM -- best PC I ever saw. Side panels in solid aluminum, sounds like a vault door when you close them.

This is a very interesting discussion and I think that you really have a very valid point here. I know that we tend to mock Dells and many other PCs from particular vendors but in my hands they are super-reliable work-horses. My workstation in the lab is still a Dell T5400 from 2008 and it has been working 24/7 since we bought it, only stopping for the upgrades. It is a rock-solid machine and still quite fast for today standards. The same is true for many other old Dells, like the Optiplex 745 or 755 we have here, that have been silently working for many many years in a dark corner covered of dust. I could say the same of the HPs or the Lenovos. I am running a cluster of many little Quad Core M57P Lenovos with 8Gb of RAM per unit and they have been performing flawlessly for years and years. My O2 has never failed, but I would not dare to let her ON for such a long time .

I can speak to that, I have several Dells around and they just keep on running. A couple of them have needed new power supplies but have otherwise continued to function.

I've got:

<2000 era Dell - that someone I knew found in the garbage - is layed up - ran as network router for years.
2002 - office computer, and was saved from the scrapyard, is now my network router.
2005 - family computer, still running. Had power supply replaced twice.
2006 - file server, still running, never had any parts replaced, except to upgrade the hard drive.
2009 - parents computer, still running. Had power supply replaced.
2011 - second laptop, still running, exterior and keyboard are in rough shape(cheap), had hard drive replaced.

[[C|-|E]] wrote:

jan-jaap wrote:
I usually don't keep PC hardware around long enough to compare it to my SGI's in terms of reliability. It's easy to complain about the (un)reliability of the PSU of a 1990 vintage 4D PowerSeries, but the truth is I have no idea whether a PC from that era would still work because I just don't have them. My experience with 'PC' server hardware is quite good as far as reliability goes, but I use Tyan or Supermicro boards, Xeon CPUs and ECC memory, and I retire them after ~ 5 years, before they fail. My current PC workstation is an HP Z600 with two hexacore Xeons and 48GB RAM -- best PC I ever saw. Side panels in solid aluminum, sounds like a vault door when you close them.

This is a very interesting discussion and I think that you really have a very valid point here. I know that we tend to mock Dells and many other PCs from particular vendors but in my hands they are super-reliable work-horses. My workstation in the lab is still a Dell T5400 from 2008 and it has been working 24/7 since we bought it, only stopping for the upgrades. It is a rock-solid machine and still quite fast for today standards. The same is true for many other old Dells, like the Optiplex 745 or 755 we have here, that have been silently working for many many years in a dark corner full of dust. I could say the same of the HPs or the Lenovos. I am running a cluster of many little Quad Core M57P Lenovos with 8Gb of RAM per unit and they have been performing flawlessly for years and years. My O2 has never failed, but I would not dare to let her ON for such a long time .

I will put another quarter in that slot. My Mac Pro is a brick house, and the HP xw9300 before it was even more beefy (I love, love, love, the way HP did their drive rails...) I have had two whitebox peecees with intel motherboards, a d850GB (threw away years ago only because it was too slow and old, it was reliable enough up to the end...) and a dp43TF which I still have and use for games (to replace it will probably be an alienware laptop, technically also dell). Never had a problem with it although I built it 6 or 7 years ago and should probably blow all the dust and crap out of there, someday...

A 2006-era mac is similar vintage to an O350, also a unix machine, much faster, and a fraction of the cost. The xw9300 would have been contemporary with an O300 or maybe a bit older, I know the guy who bought it still uses it (for his kids to play games, etc, on)

uunix wrote: Lets face it.. owning SGI gear is like owning a classic car.. consistent maintenance.

Unlike a car, however, there are very rarely warning signs in a computer that something is about to blow up such as strange sounds or bad gas milage. You just push the power button one day and either nothing happens or smoke starts pouring out

well since this is beyond off topic now anyway i can throw in a dell-adventure i had as well.


i had 3 dells once. new, same model, right from the factory. they were meant to be used for a test case and therefore had to be identical. same parts in there, same bios settings ... all the same. they should run linux for that test so i threw in the (enterprise edition) suse dvd and installed one according to the test specs. despite a little annoyance - the installation crashed without any meaningful output unless acpi was off - the first box was done. i cloned the disk 2 times and booted the other 2. one of the others however didn't wanna run. neither suse nor dell could tell me why and i ended up giving the flawed one back, changed the test environment so that 2 were enough. that whole stunt took about one full workday and time was important in that case. not to mention the additional cost.
so despite having a peecee that was considered top of the line at the time and an enterprise edition linux things just didn't work and neither of the vendors was able to tell why.

this is only one of many similar examples and the reason why i never considered x86 nor linux to be professional gear. the day i get convinced otherwise has yet to come.

The reason for me to endure some of the problems with SGI gear is the same reason I love the older hotrods and muscle cars, style. These machines for me are worth the occasional headache for the shear style and legacy of running them. Unlike a lot of people here who run these 24/7 mine are used rarely and turned on and off all the time. My kid plays on an octane2 whenever he feels like it. In the three years he has been using the system it has never failed to start and play his games. The O2+ does what it wants when it wants and truly is my arch rival. I have replaced everything but the plastics and still starts when it wants to.

this is only one of many similar examples and the reason why i never considered x86 nor linux to be professional gear.

What do you call 'professional' gear? I would consider what people use at work, and where I work at (the head office, at least) most either have imacs or the cheapest dell/hp laptop the IT dept. could find. When it breaks down they just ship it back. If it is 3 years old and/or out of warranty they just replace it. If you are loosing billable or working time over a peecee you are doing something wrong. If my work macbook were to go tits-up they just provide a new one and it takes maybe an hour to restore from backup. IT more than likely already has a few spares sitting around already if anybody needs them.

What you consider 'professional' is what I consider 'hobby toys'. People don't do work with finicky old computers anymore or else they will go crazy (viz. the OP )

foetz wrote: i cloned the disk 2 times and booted the other 2. one of the others however didn't wanna run.

This story reminds me of some issues I've had in the past. It is often not enough to have the same model. Even within the same *revision* some vendors will swap out a chip e.g. wifi, audio, etc, which can cause issues. I have a model number A1502 macbook and while the clockspeed or ram amount might be different, all of the other parts within that model are identical.

A lot of vendors such as dell or HP will run out of the turbofrazzler7400 widget and substitute a vickytron9000 instead. Or even next year's turbofrazzler7402 (could be the exact same part and maybe only the PCI-ID has changed!) Same performance specs, sure. But a new driver is required, and your cloned disk won't work anymore even though the Model and Revision numbers are the same. I have been bit by this issue a few times as well even with the dell optiplex or whatever their business line is. However, apple buys in such large quantities that, if nothing else, such practices would quickly eat into their profits.

The reason for me to endure some of the problems with SGI gear is the same reason I love the older hotrods and muscle cars, style.

Which is great. Those cars aren't working to make money like a delivery truck or rented van. This analogy works perfectly. Company cars are not Triumph TR7s . They are camrys, escapes, malibus. (well, I have an escape/kuga, and think it is quite swell )

guardian452 wrote: What do you call 'professional' gear?

serious stuff that's not targeted at home users i.e. no peecee. machines that don't have "cheap" as their primary objective and that are not made for providing the average joe with some cool toys to be shown off at the weekend's holiday video show
to be more precise things like the nec sx series, superdome, the remains of sun and last but not least the ibm candidates such as the power based machines and mainframes. together with whatever goes well with them; hitachi san, tape robots ... you get the idea.
the term "professional" describes the kind of machine, what and for whom it was made for, with which obectives in mind and so on. that doesn't depend on its age, popularity or commercial success. obviously looking at the different categories in that regard the approaches how to "design" a system from the ground up is very different depending on what it's meant to be in the end.
same goes for software of course, a control system for a power plant has of course very different priorities than an instagram uploader for ios

What you consider 'professional' is what I consider 'hobby toys'.

couldn't be more wrong. see above.

foetz wrote: a control system for a power plant has of course very different priorities than an instagram uploader for ios

As somebody who has many years of experience developing for very large industrial automation systems, e.x. many racks of RS5000 on up to entire plants running on one system, I now develop for low-volume (100<(units/year)<1000) automotive ECUs using STW . We used to use a delphi controller with matlab toolchain but the licensing terms were too restrictive.

I don't have an instagram account and my IOS stuff is a side project as a low cost alternative for a diagnostic tool.

I can guaran-fucking-tee you that none of that stuff comes from IT vendors such as: "nec sx series, superdome, the remains of sun and last but not least the ibm".

guardian452 wrote:

foetz wrote: a control system for a power plant has of course very different priorities than an instagram uploader for ios

As somebody who has many years of experience developing for very large industrial automation systems, e.x. many racks of RS5000 on up to entire plants running on one system, I now develop for low-volume (100<(units/year)<1000) automotive ECUs using STW . We used to use a delphi controller with matlab toolchain but the licensing terms were too restrictive.

I don't have an instagram account and my IOS stuff is a side project as a low cost alternative for a diagnostic tool.

I can guaran-fucking-tee you that none of that stuff comes from IT vendors such as: "nec sx series, superdome, the remains of sun and last but not least the ibm".

hehe i meant that more general, not that nec is used for power plant systems

of course

guardian452 wrote: People don't do work with finicky old computers anymore or else they will go crazy (viz. the OP )

Ja Or actually, yes and no.

I've had 286, 386, 486, PPro, P-111, P-IV peecees and an Indigo, Indigo2, Indy, Octane, O2, O300, Fuel and this O350. Windows 3.1 could drive you crazy but none of the peecees was unreliable about at least getting through POST. Of the SGI's, all were fine except the O2 is a flake. But the Fuel and O350 are losers. Losers by design.

First the environment monitoring. We'll give them the benefit of the doubt and say "bad batch of chips." But taking a garden variety power supply and butchering it so they could get ten times the price is inexcusable.

The fact that the twelve-cent part they designed and put into that off-the-shelf power supply just so they could rape their customers turned out to be worthless crap is quadruple inexcusable. I won't tell you how many hours I wasted because of that stinking little piece of garbage. It's embarrassing.

Bob and Bozo should be castrated.

The O350 is pretty junky inside. It looks like (and probably was) designed by the lowest-cost recent graduate from Miss Beeler's School for Retarded Children. This was some guy who'd heard about "professional hardware" but all he'd ever seen was a Dell. So what we got was a fricking Dell at Haagen-Dazs prices ($6 for a 4oz cup here, what a ripoff) with Yugo reliability. Be still my heart. With the L1 being essential to the operation of these computers, SGI spent doodly-squat on design or testing. I know of at least four of these boxes with the exact same problem.

Inexcusable.

The "no" part to your statement : all software now will drive a sane person over the brink. But it is possible to use fonky old hardware for work. Pro/E always works for me. Framemaker always works. The web is becoming less and less useful but Netcrap 3.0 always worked. FTP, NFS, all that stuff always works. The things you really need , still work just as well on an Octane as they do on an i7. So the hot-to-go racy latest stuff is nice for the speed but it isn't essential. I type pretty slow anyhow. The Octane always ran. I can live with 700 mhz processors. What I can't live with is a "professional-grade, enterprise-server-quality" box from the "trusted leader in high-performance computing" that refuses to even turn on because the nitwits who designed it should have been playing with plastic shovels in the sandbox.

SGI didn't go broke because of "the Inventor's Dilemna." That's pure Havvad Business School hogwash. They went broke becasue they made and sold crap. The early stuff was good, the late stuff is fatally flawed. If you can't even turn it on, well, hell ...

Let's not even discuss Bob and Bozo's role in this fiasco. Let's just string them up by the balls and splatter their smarmy faces with rotten vegetables.

If we were still running Windows 2000 or even XP, the answer would be ugly but obvious. But now even that option is closed. May as well run Irix on the Octane. The advantages of new hardware are not overcome by the disadvantages of all the ghastly software you have to run to be "current." I'm going to get my mail through iTunes, right. It's shit. It's all just plain old ordinary shit hiding behind high-dollar marketing.

Time to retreat to the nineteenth century.

It is often not enough to have the same model. Even within the same *revision* some vendors will swap out a chip e.g. wifi, audio, etc, which can cause issues. I have a model number A1502 macbook and while the clockspeed or ram amount might be different, all of the other parts within that model are identical.

Dell is not actually a computer company. They are logistics specialists. They buy whatever is on sale that week for the cheapest price, so it is not fair to use Dell as a benchmark for anything but trucking costs. At least with IBM, if it says "Adaptec 2940" then it has an Adaptec 2940.

A lot of vendors such as dell or HP ...

Here, let me correct that for you -- "post-Carly HP ..."

However, apple buys in such large quantities that, if nothing else, such practices would quickly eat into their profits.

No, Dell became king of the hill because of those practices. But there are drawbacks to that approach as well. Especially for hobbyists (but there's only three of them in the entire world now so no big deal.)

The reason for me to endure some of the problems with SGI gear is the same reason I love the older hotrods and muscle cars, style.

But a 70 Challenger or a 68 Mustang or even a Chebby Camaro will turn on every goddamned time you turn the key. The absolutely disgusting crap quality of the late-model extremely expensive SGI's is appalling. If you buy an Hispano-Suiza, you get an Hispano-Suiza. With SGI, you pay for a DM6 but you get a fricking $35 Adaptec.

If you consider a rusted-out 1978 Pontiac station wagon a "classic" then you'll be overjoyed with the O350.

guardian452 wrote: I can guaran-fucking-tee you that none of that stuff comes from IT vendors such as: "nec sx series, superdome, the remains of sun and last but not least the ibm".

Pre-Ginny, that was not true for IBM. They did their own stuff. Now, tho, it's probably sub-sub-sub developed by three indigents in Bombay. Fiduciary responsibility to Ginny and Sam's New House Fund, you know. Plus they have to save up enough to establish their philanthropic funds after they step off the sinking ship.

Time to go drag the Octane out of the closet. Damn, I like the faster p and mem. But if it won't turn on, what's the point ?

The things you really need, still work just as well on an Octane as they do on an i7. So the hot-to-go racy latest stuff is nice for the speed but it isn't essential. I type pretty slow anyhow.

I have an i7 mac, because you need something super fast to use the web these days. Does it actually feel fast?
Nope. It leaks so much memory that it starts swapping when you type , eventually lagging minutes behind to finish echoing back a couple of sentences of typed input. There is even a race condition in the interface that will sometimes scramble your input if you type ahead of the system. It's a dog.

I have a 1.4ghz c2d macbook air and it is fast, considering what it is. It cannot play the latest games but e.g. unreal tournament (2004) and halo are fine. It can even browse the web, and play youtube videos fullscreen. (although I don't have flash player installed on any machine so that probably helps somewhat). However, it will get noisy if it is compiling for more than a few minutes, the 4x3.0ghz mac pro runs rings around it

I have not had performance issues with my i5 mac but since it was updated to 10.10 I have had lots of little issues. e.g. wifi disconnecting, etc. It doesn't do that anymore so maybe an update fixed it? My Apple-branded bluetooth kb+mouse became so unreliable I went back to USB and use the BT stuff with my mac pro at home. They worked just fine up through 10.9.

If macs couldn't type anymore I would say there is a problem. More likely your machine is broken. (the NSA has installed a spyware for you??)

i can also only state that i've never seen an issue browsing the web on my i7 non-retina MBP and an i5 mac mini. certainly no laggy behaviour at all using semi-recent firefoxes. 10.7 and 10.9 here.

portable machines can get slow when they are getting really hot however. apple runs a kernel task that from the looks of it is just hogging CPU cycles for a while till the CPU cools down. feels like system swapping to a really slow HD in these cases. if memory serves there are some options you can set to keep it from doing that.

I've got an i7 Macbook Air and it's honestly one of the best systems I've ever owned. Yes, Apple are engaging in ever more disappointing tactics to extract yet more money from their customers and I still can't get my head around the new Macbook with just a single port for charging, accessories, etc etc.

BUT. My Air absolutely screams. I honestly can't think in the 18 months I've had it, that I've had more than one or two "WTF" moments when the computer is churning away on some unknown process, or it's done things I've not expected. I open it up, it fires up immediately, and it just works beautifully every time. It's this kind of reliability and well thought out design that I guess keeps people coming back despite the crazy prices. I know I'd be very reluctant now to replace this Macbook Air with anything other than another Apple notebook when it starts to get a bit tired.

chicaneuk wrote: I honestly can't think in the 18 months I've had it, that I've had more than one or two "WTF" moments

The Assistant had her Macbook "upgraded" by the Apple store so she could play the newest Facetime with her friends. Of course she never did that so six months later when we went somewhere and turned it on, we were faced with a login panel that required an Apple ID password. If anyone from the Asshole Store had been there at that moment he'd now be sporting a macbook sideways up his rectum.

We were just so thrilled about this.

I know I'd be very reluctant now to replace this Macbook Air with anything other than another Apple notebook when it starts to get a bit tired.

That says more about the despicable state of computing in general than it does about how great Apple is

Here's another one:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/SGI-CMN026-Sili ... 1543167450

No excuse for this. That part at least should be bulletproof. Without an L1 you can't do anything .

hamei wrote:
No excuse for this. That part at least should be bulletproof. Without an L1 you can't do anything .

Nothing is bulletproof. I find it hard to doom an entire model because some develop the same error. In the last several years I have picked up literally dozens of these systems with only one having an L1 issue. One look at the one on ebay and you can see it has had a hard life. Once these systems leave the main company that used them there is no telling what has happened to them.

I have pulled apart several of these to find corrosion on the back of the main board. For this to happen they had to have been used or stored in a wet/ humid environment. When we lived near the beach I replaced several power supplies and motherboards in our HP/Dell PCs.


Is it a stunning design? no. Is a worthless pile of a computer? no Take any bad ass Dell and throw it around, store it out side for two years, ship it 3000 miles poorly packed and then tell me how reliable it is.

I have sold and continue to sell the O350s with very little grief. Like I PMed you, "thanks for tainting my target market" Do you still want me to send a few mainboards for your beloved O350?