In the previous post, I’ve been looking at a number of different companies that offer bare metal servers in their data centers. An interesting offer that is also the cheapest one I have found so far is from Scaleway. For a monthly price of 33 euros, they offer an Intel Xeon E3 E1220 or equivalent based server with 32 GB of RAM and 2x 1 TB SSDs, located in one of their Paris data centers. Compared to prices elsewhere this is very cheap. So where’s the catch?
The ‘catch’ is that the server hardware used for the offer is actually quite old. According to Intel, the E3-1220 CPU line was introduced in 2011. In other words, the server hardware in that data center is at least 10 years old by now in 2024, accounting for the fact that new processors usually don’t make it right away into datacenters for mainstream applications.
A 10 year old server basically means two things: It is quite slow compared to today’s hardware and I’m not sure what kind of impact this has on the MTBF rate. It looks like Scaleway offers such older servers on a grand scale. In this article, they describe how they retrofitted 14.000 servers to increase their livespan in production and to reduce their overall carbon footprint. An interesting story!
When I look at my ‘bare metal’ requirements, I mainly need RAM for lots of VMs and SSD storage. Processing power is of secondary important to me. This makes Scaleway’s offer very interesting for my applications, so I decided to give it a try. During the order process, one can go for either a monthly payment cycle that costs 33 euros, or for an hourly rental, which costs about twice that much per month. I decided to go for the second one for my initial trials.
After selecting Ubuntu 24.04 as operating system and importing a public SSH key for access, the installation process starts, and the server becomes available about 15 minutes later. I did a quick inventory of the hardware and came up with the following:
Processor: I got an CPU E3-1230 V2 processor with 4 physical cores and 8 Threads. This CPU is 2 years younger than the minimum CPU in the offer. That’s nice. I’m not sure if this is because I opted for the hourly payment that costs twice as much or if I was just lucky, as this processor is said to be at least 50% faster than the 1220. More about that in a follow up post.
RAM: As advertised, I got 32 GB of RAM. As can be expected of a 10 year old server, it’s DDR3 RAM.
SSD: The system I got was equipped with 2 Western Digital 1 TB SATA SSDs (WDC PC SA530 SDASB8Y1T00). According to the datasheet, the 1 TB model has an endurance of 400 TBW (Terrabytes written). So let’s have a look with ‘smartctl’ of how much data has already been written to the drives:
The first SSD in the system reports 481.271.590.966 sectors written. Based on a 512 byte sector size, this is 229 TB. The second SSD gave me a value of 502.283.521.500 sectors written. Based on a 512 byte sector size, this is 239 TB. In other words: There is still a lot of life left in those SSDs. Smartctl also revealed that the two SATA SSDs are not run on their maximum speed of 6 Gbit/s but at 3 Gbit/s. In other words, the maximum read/write speed should be 300 MB/s at most.
So much for today. In the next post on this topic, I’ll have a closer look at the CPU and disk performance of the system.