Hardware For Sale/Trade

mopar5150 wrote: Nothing is bulletproof.

Fine, but it should be at least whiffle-ball proof. When you drive two blocks to the grocery store, you don't have to fear the engine will erupt in flames (power supply.) Or the wheels will fall off leaving you dragging ass along the road (environment monitoring.) And at least the damn thing is expected to start up.

When you purchase a product from the leader in high-tech computing, you should be able to expect a bare mimum of quality. It's built exactly like a Dell. IBM, HP, Sun all built much better servers and sold them for way less money.

I find it hard to doom an entire model because some develop the same error.

Of the people I am aware of who actually use these things, every one has had this experience. The others were luckier than me and the problem went away (for a while.) But luck !=quality.

Oh wait. Except for jan-jaap. But he leaves his turned on 24/7. I s'pose that's the other option, except what about when the power supply bursts into flames ? Maybe I can fix that, too. Oh goody. Why don't I just learn C, write an operating system and design my own applications while I'm at it ?

In the last several years I have picked up literally dozens of these systems with only one having an L1 issue.

But you have to actually use them and depend on them to come across the problems. I used the Fuel for ten years, daily. Except for the days when it wouldn't run and I was busy hunting for spare parts to get it back in operation. I paid $3500 for that thing. Put my money where my mouth was, shoulda kept it closed. Experience is what you get when everything turns to shit. The software is good. The later hardware is horrid. My Octane was a tank (and probably bullet-proof, too )

I have pulled apart several of these to find corrosion on the back of the main board.

Mine is pretty. No corrosion, no dents, always lived in a non-smoking house. I did swap out the power supply that catches fire and burns the house down tho.

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.

Have a Netvista here. Bought used. If you know China then you know that means it was featured in that Samsonite ad. I put a bigger hard disk in it (think the old one is still around somewhere) and I clean the fans once every five years whether it needs it or not. We've had it over seven years and it's never failed to start. Not once.

I have sold and continue to sell the O350s with very little grief.

That's good. They look cute and the numalink thing is trick. If you don't depend on them, the faster processors and memory are great. But if you need to use the computer, it's a no-win situation. A slower computer that works, or one that you have to sacrifice chickens to. Or use Windows (I'll die first). P285 Intellistations don't have dual-head (as far as I can find out) and they are CDE (yuck but ...), HP zx6000 is Itanic which means the binaries for most of my programs are not available, I s'pose a C8000 is one possibility, Apple has no CAD software, wtf is a person supposed to do ? If you say Solaris I'll pee on your leg

It's discouraging.

when unix workstations were common it was well known that unlike PCs or home computers in general you were not supposed to shut them down and start them back up on a daily basis and one of the reasons given was that the hardware wouldn't cope well with that. the sgi's i used to use in the office were kept running all year round, even the indy's and o2's that had zero server duty.

seems like a case of " you're running it wrong ".

mopar5150 wrote:
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 am not completely sure about this... some of our Dells and HPs have been working in cold rooms (4ºC) for many many years and there they are, without any problem. And I am talking about cold rooms with lots of humidity because we are opening and closing the doors many times a day .

[[C|-|E]] wrote:

mopar5150 wrote:
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 am not completely sure about this... some of our Dells and HPs have been working in cold rooms (4ºC) for many many years and there they are, without any problem. And I am talking about cold rooms with lots of humidity because we are opening and closing the doors many times a day .

4 deg! I have never frozen my SGIs but it might be worth it. A true silent Octane, no fans. I live in a place where during the summer it gets to 91 degrees... at 4am.

mopar5150 wrote: I live in a place where during the summer it gets to 91 degrees... at 4am.