So today, at work, I tested a bunch of unracked servers that had been decommissioned over the years. Specifically, I found:
- Dell PowerEdge 2550 – Wouldn’t boot – Raid array was shot
- Dell PowerEdge 2650 – Booted to Win2k3 Login screen
- Dell PowerEdge 2850 – Booted to Win2k3 Login Screen
These servers were incredibly loud. With 10k RPM SCSI hard drives, and all the case fans running, individually each was very loud. My goal is to either scrounge some parts for our existing PowerEdge R710 or add a server back to the loop for Database development work. All of these devices are dated, which I understand, but I think we can take the ram from the 2850 and add to the R710. Then I can re-rack the 2650, load it with a lightweight debian install and get a mysql server going to begin testing a port over of a rapidly aging Access Database.
*EDIT – So the ram from the 2850 is not compatible with the PowerEdge R710, but I found some dirt cheap RAM on ebay to update the R710, which only has 4 gigs of ram.