kevinb2001

The one you're looking at looks like they have all dimm slots filled to hit 48gb so a mixture of 2 & 4gb dimms. http://www.ebay.com/itm/Dell-PowerEdge-R710-Server-Dual-X5550-QC-2-66GHz-144GB-2-5in-Rails-RPS-H700-/172498914994?hash=item2829bc8eb2:g:AywAAOSw-0xYc9NY That seller has 10 in stock for about $150 more but it comes with 18x 8gb dimms already, not sure how much storage you're wanting to grow into with freenas but it'd be cheaper than deciding to upgrade the ram in the first one later.

Lol did you read everything, they eventually come back admitting that it was previously returned and somewhere their system had a note saying it was damaged when it was returned the first time and therefore damaged before sending it to me. I would say that pretty much exonerates me. Anyone not seeing the problem in the first place ... a business saying "well we'll take this back even though you damaged it" is like saying "well we think you're stealing from us but we have to put up with it because you bought it through ebay".... maybe you'd be ok with that but I certainly take offence to someone calling me a thief.

Yeah but 2 quad core hyperthreaded westmere processors like e5620's which are often in those cheap socket 1366 systems will out perform the 4 quad core tigerton E7340's you're getting. The E7340's are like first generation intel core architecture and still use a front side bus to communicate, which means any time those processors want to send anything to each other, communicate with the ram or communicate with anything else, everything has to go through the north bridge. I think the reason you think the quad E7340's are better is that you're only looking at clock speed and number of cores, but anything older than socket 1366 there's major major design differences, plus at least a 20% lower ipc. I realize there's a price difference but you're going to pay that on your power bill faster than you think if you actually keep it powered on, s1366 uses quite a bit more power than newer architectures at idle but the older g5 you have is going to use double the electricity of even a dual s1366 system. Rough estimates based on apc battery backup calculator and google reviews put this thing at 400w just at idle and over 800w under load and that's without any add-on cards and without all the hard drive bays filled. Which unless you get free electricity will make up the difference in their prices pretty quick if you're running this at load for cad. The G5 will still be fun to play around with if you've never used server hardware before but I think you're expecting it to be much faster than it actually is. I'm no expert on european power prices but by average rates I could find online, if you use this thing for cad even 7 days a month that's 20 pounds a month in electricity.

well, I did say an extra 100 pounds, which would be like 170... but pretty much any dual socket 1366 G6 will be better specs than the G5 you bought and could be upgraded in the future if you watch for deals on ebay. The older G5 with it's front side bus and fb-dimms is going to be slower and crank out a ton of heat, using more electricity at the same time, which if you power the g5 on for more than 3 months a year it's probably going to use 100 pounds more in electricity. You can't just look at # of cores and clock speed to determine what system has better specs, especially with architectures as old as those 4 processor g5's. You also don't have to go with an hp, you can also look for deals on dell and supermicro dual 1366 systems. There's a lot of them out there even in eu/uk on ebay every month. I realize you bought the g5 already and I'm not judging you for it, I'm just suggesting that you might want to quickly learn what you can from it, then sell it in favor of something more practical.

What do you mean by externally powered? Doesn't the G5 you bought just have 4 hot swap power supplies? The G6's are the same but there's only 2 hot swap power supplies because they don't use that much power.

What do you have Rockstor running on you just said you built it but I don't see anything showing hardware specs of what it's running on? What's in between the computer you're transferring the files from and the device running rockstor? Just a single switch? What are you transferring? One large file or a ton of little ones? Were you doing one copy and paste or several at the same time?

In my experience as long as you have an email address from almost any university/college in north america, you can get windows server through imagine. Microsoft verifies you're a student by the fact you're using a student email address from that school. The school doesn't have to do anything on a per user basis as far as my experience goes. I think it's more just that microsoft has to recognize your school as a verified college/uni, which unless it's a new school it usually is. I've seen people use university email addresses that they still have despite the fact they graduated 5 years ago and didn't take anything to do with IT, and colleges offering night classes that give students a school email address also usually work.

you'd be better off running freenas in a vm off of esxi, using pcie passthrough of an hba, than you would be to try and run virtualbox in freenas 9.x as a vm host. Not sure if the one you're looking at comes with all 4gb dimms but usually the ones with e5507's do. Maybe look for an R710 that doesn't come with cpu or ram, and then buy 8gb 10600r dimms seperately and upgrade to x5670's. Also maybe post the description or link to whatever you're looking at buying.

I would look at socket 1366 options if you want it for general homelab-type learning/ a minecraft server. http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Supermicro-7046-GPU-server-16-Core-2x-Xeon-E5620-2-4-Ghz-12-GB-Ram-4-X-GPU-Slots-/262808742130?hash=item3d309f28f2:g:Vh0AAOSw5cNYe19Z just one example but there's a ton of 1366 decommissioned servers that are still very fast and much cheaper than anything socket 2011 and are still very upgradeable. Unless you need more than 12core/24thread, you'll get a lot more bang for your buck out of buying a 1366 system and upgrading it with x5670's or x5680's. Something with E5620's will still be fine for a minecraft server though. Decomm HP servers will be even cheaper but you can run into problems like not being able to update the bios because you have to have paid support to get access to bios updates. In the long run decomm supermicro servers are a bit more expensive but worth the extra price.

I'm not 100% sure if EU has an equivalent to Microsoft Imagine but as long as you/someone you know has a student email address you can usually get an educational use copy of windows server through that still I believe. I'd recommend checking it out. If you want something that's going to be more manageable for heat/sound, still inexpensive and ebay is full of parts in both americas/eu, and will run circles around that older g5, look into the HP G6 servers. ML350 G6's are probably an extra hundred pounds but use socket 1366 and some of them can be upgraded to use x5670 xeons (some motherboard revisions won't take x56XX, only x55XX so get bios/rev from seller if possible) two 4-core or 6-core X55XX / X56XX xeons will be much faster than 4x E7340, will support vt-d and some other features you'll probably find out you want later, and comes in both tower and rack versions. Also word of warning when using HP SAS controllers in HP chassis, if you don't use HP branded hard drives some versions will cause the fans to ramp up to 100% IIRC, which you don't want if you're going to be in the same room while using it... unless you also have a very capable stereo and are going to blast some acdc to block it out.

Customer service passed away quietly last night. It succumbed to a long illness. The wake is at the next quarterly meeting, and the funeral will follow shortly. Each year companies worldwide struggle for sales growth and profit, yet a conservative estimate of their loss from poor customer service comes in at a staggering $338.5 B a year. While customers vote with their pocket books, customers have become accustomed to poor service. Few companies stand out. Mediocre service is rampant. Customers don't necessarily demand more. ^^^ exerts from: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140513214859-64275548-the-death-of-customer-service It's a sad day when the majority of people simply accept poor customer service as common place because "everyone else is doing it".

Actually there's lots of retailers who do not act that way. I've received damaged/DOA refurbished products from Newegg before, their response? Sorry for the inconvenience, here's your rma - not "here's your rma even though you broke it we just can't prove that". Who else does a better job? MemoryExpress, CanadaComputers, Amazon... LOTS of ebay stores...

So you think that the mentality of guilty until proven innocent means that the CS rep did their job? The fact that someone else screwed up first doesn't make perpetuating a problem OK, nor does assuming I damaged it because they had no proof otherwise (though, they would have had they bothered to put a minimal amount of effort into investigating). Maybe you're ok with buying from places that have that mentality but I'm not. I respect that he sent me an apology, but the revelation of their policies would make me never recommend them to anyone again. What if I hadn't bought this from their ebay store and bought it from their regular website, they admit they wouldn't have given me a refund. That should be terrifying to any potential customer. Situations like this are the reason that some retailers have changed their policy and at the very least teach CS policies of not accusing customers.

So moral of the story, 9/10 a customer might lie in order to make someone else pay for their mistake, but in this case that's not what happened. I respect the employee for coming back with an apology and maybe he just had a bad day and had dealt with too many customers who were actually guilty. The part that puts me off from buying from NCIX again is the fact that I sent a complaint from my regular ncix account on their website to their customer service and NEVER received a response. Their policy of not checking motherboards before sending terrifies me as a customer if you're then going to assume in all cases the customer is at fault. That might be true most of the time but I've seen a store receive 3 in a row Asus Sabertooth motherboards new in box from a shipment from their supplier with bent pins, which is why they now go to the expense of at least visually inspecting boards when they're sold. I don't expect NCIX to do that with all boards they sell as I'm sure they move a lot of inventory, but on $1000 boards and especially when selling inventory you've had sitting around for years and put up for sale in an outlet store they should really open the box and at least take a photo of the overall physical condition of the board and the socket pins. Also 100% this was the real NCIX because my RMA went on their purolator account to their warehouse address. This was my response back to NCIX after the original post: Wow, so for some reason you feel the need to reinforce your suggestion that I broke this. What a joke, you admit that you don't bother to even visually check things before sending them out and yet you think it's more likely that I damaged this in the first 5 minutes of receiving it than it is that you sent it to me already in this condition. If your inventory tracking is so good on XEON (note: there's no z) motherboards did you even bother to go check with this one person who may have handled it if maybe they remember one getting damaged and forgetting to write it off or put a note on the box? Any investigation into the actual history of this board? I doubt it. My guess would be your inventory system said it had never been sold so you assumed it was actually still new in the box, meanwhile it had been taken out and damaged and that's probably why you still had it in stock. Thank you for confirming that I should never buy from your company again. The response a week later once my RMA got back to them: We received the return and processed your RMA. Your refund will be issued within 24 hours back to your PayPal account.I also owe you an apology. Our returns team figured out how the motherboard was damaged. This motherboard had been sold at some point and then returned. The original RMA specifically notes it was damaged and because the motherboard was considered out of warranty at the time it should have been sent to be recycled, but somehow it got returned to the shelf as a new motherboard instead. I was wrong and I should have taken more time to investigate then just jump to what I thought was the obvious case of customer caused damaged. For that I am very sorry.I understand my apology isn't going to change how you were treated or your opinion, but I still feel it was important that you were made aware that you were unfairly treated in this case and I was the one who was in the wrong.

Also, I bought this to upgrade my lab server at work that only gets used for testing. If I broke it, the company wouldn't care, I would just have $500 less in my "do whatever you want and buy lab equipment to test on and we write it off" fund for the year, and I would just have to wait until next year to upgrade from a dual 1366 setup to dual 2011 setup... I don't really care about the money.

Thank you @AshleyAshes for seeing the point. I never said NCIX wasn't a real company and that it's not possible to get a working product from them. I've purchased many things from NCIX over the years both for work and personal use. This was the first time I had a problem, and the help I received with that problem laced with insults. I personally expect good customer service from companies I spend thousands of dollars with, if other people don't that's fine.

the invoice I got, on which I asked a question and got a response was from someone with an @ncix.com email address how do they fake that through replies. I'm aware you can fake an outgoing email but when I send to that address it wouldn't go through and be able to give me another reply back if the email address was a fake.

Well, my problem is that they continue to rudely suggest that I broke it and they're only taking it back because ebay says they have to. Hence the warning to anyone who looks through their ebay store for products that might be a good deal, they might be a good deal because they're broken and they don't bother to check things before selling them on their ebay store. Had I not checked this immediately I would have no recourse as they only offer a 15 day warranty on items sold through there. I often don't get around to opening stuff I order for a few weeks if it's just for home use.

No offense but did you read it? Unless this is a very convincing fake: http://stores.ebay.ca/NCIX-Outlet-Store It's their official store. Plus I got an invoice from them after buying it on ebay... so I'm going to go with it's actually them.

I purchased a supposedly new in box motherboard from the NCIX ebay outlet store. My experience was so unbelievably terrible, that I will never buy from NCIX again nor will I recommend to anyone who comes to me for buying advice to buy from here again. I'm getting a refund but the fact that they continue to insist that it was me who damaged the board and there's no way it could have been damaged by them is disgraceful. I DIDN'T DAMAGE THE BOARD. I sent the first message within 30 minutes of Canada Post delivering it. If I damaged it I would have eaten the cost and moved on. The employee who deals with their ebay store admits that he didn't check the board before sending it. In fact his response seems to indicate that they don't check any of their outlet store sales before sending them out. He seems to think no one buys Xeon boards but as someone who buys more than one actual brand new server board most years and enough entry level enterprise drives like re4's to sink a ship I think that statement is laughable. Maybe no one buys them from NCIX and now I see why. For reference here was my exchange with their staff that has lost my business for good: Message from me to NCIX ebay outlet: Hello, I just received my order but I'm very unhappy. Your listing said this was new in box and undamaged but someone has clearly broken the bottom right corner of the motherboard. This was not a result of shipping because the anti-static bag has a rip in it at the same spot and it was clearly mishandled or dropped at some point. All I want is a working undamaged motherboard as advertised. Let me know what you want to do. (picture attached) Response from NCIX: New message from: outlet_ncix Top Rated Seller That kind of damage would only have occurred after the motherboard was removed from the packaging unless the box itself was damaged and there would no reason for us to remove a unopened motherboard or handle just the motherboard in that way. So even though we can't prove that do you want to return it at our cost for a full refund? My response to NCIX ebay outlet: Yes I would like to return it for a full refund. Also I don't appreciate the insinuation that I damaged the board. The box was NOT sealed and the bag has no sticker to show that it hadn't been opened by anyone. Having spent a great deal of my past working in retail, I can guarantee you this happened from one of two things: 1. the board was sold and NCIX returned it without adequately looking over the board. (not trying to tell you how to do your job, but it's concerning that you don't inspect boards for damage to socket pins or anything else, especially when selling them through your outlet store, where everything's either been returned or has been sitting around so long you just want to get rid of it. Heck if I buy a motherboard from any local store they open the box in store and ask me to verify at the very least that there are no bent socket pins because so many people are stupid and damage them after they leave the store). 2. YOUR STAFF (not me) opened it and damaged it and decided rather than get in trouble, would just put it back and not say anything. The idea that no one who works at NCIX has ever opened a motherboard box to handle it or look at it before, show to a customer, whatever, is completely absurd. This would make you the only electronics chain selling computer parts that has never opened a motherboard box and handled a motherboard. Not to mention I guarantee I can go on your youtube channel and find videos of your staff opening brand new products to make videos. You're telling me not a single one of those ever got sold as being still new? Now obviously I can't tell you which of those two scenarios resulted in a damaged motherboard being sent to me but your accusation that I damaged it is insulting enough to guarantee that not only do I not ever buy anything from NCIX again, but neither will the company I work for, or the many other personal contacts who come to me for purchasing advice, ever be recommended to you, and actually dissuaded instead. Response from NCIX: NIB products are not inspected or even opened for customers prior to purchase, our company has policy against that. They can be opened after the customer purchases them and if they change their mind then it returned as an opened product. If they discover the product is damaged or defective it is returned to the supplier for credit/replacment. The product is not returned to our inventory. Since this obviously not a manufacturer defect or shipped to us in such a condition. The damage either occurred at some point well it was sitting in the warehouse, during shipping or when in your possession. The only time this motherboard would ever be at a retail store is if there was already a pending order for one. People do not purchase ZEON Motherboards on a whim so we don't stock them at our stores. The only people at our warehouse who would even handle a product outside of the retail packaging is our assembly team, and the only person who would handle this kind of motherboard is our assembly manager and he wouldn't need to cover up damaging a motherboard. Regardless of how or when the damage occurred we are required by eBay to allow you to return the motherboard for a full refund. If this wasn't purchased through eBay we would refuse the request to return the product as this would be considered customer damage by Supermicro and they would refuse our credit request.