>>From Mark Warner
>> You can buy pallets of old P-IIIs for next to nothing on eBay.
>
> Wow. This was a great tip. The most questionable part of that
> statement, actually, is the P-III part. I found P-IVs much easier,
> and they were still amazingly cheap. Apparently the search term to
> use is "LOT" as in "LOT OF 10 pentium 4 2.8 GHZ P4, 512 DDR, CDROM"
> (starting bid $870, 0 bids so far, ends tomorrow evening). Or "Lot of
> 34 Dell Optiplex GX260 PC Computer P4 40GB" (Buy it now
> $1,359.96.. that's $40 each!! shipping will probably make it a bit more,
> but still). Mostly I'm averse to used hardware because we want the
> machines to be reliable, nearly identical, and require little labor to
> set up. Buying lots of nearly identical hardware like this should
> address those concerns. And the prices are amazing.
Glad that helped. Common carrier freight on that should be in the
$150-250 range, depending on weight, volume, and distance, so it might
add $8 to the unit cost. If it were me, I'd count on 3-4 being DOA or
otherwise needing some TLC. If you got 30 good ones for around $1600,
you'd be looking at roughly $55 each. Not too shabby. Set one up, image
rest of the drives, and off you go.
Sounds like it would be a fun project. Then again, I'm kind of a
hardware tinkerer. Comes from cobbling together old junk to make
something usable -- there's some satisfaction in that. Heck, I'd even be
willing to roll up my sleeves and help if you bought the pizza.
--
Mark Warner
_______________________________________________
BLUG mailing list
BLUG@linuxfan.com
http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug
No comments:
Post a Comment