Where Do You Shop for Server Components?

Devi0s asks: "Along with many other Slashdot readers, I have been building my own PCs for years. I use hardware review sites such as Ars Technica, Tech Report, and Tom's Hardware Guide to research the components and pick out the best, and I use PriceWatch and ResellerRatings to find the best deals and to make sure I am dealing with a reputable vendor. I work in a small consulting firm where money is tight, and I'd like to test the waters with a few ideas of my own. In each case, various servers and external storage enclosures are needed on the cheap that will be pushed to their limits. Are Slashdot readers building their own servers and storage enclosures? What web sites provide the latest news, research, and and comparisons for server hardware? Where do you go to buy server components and vet your vendor?"

Newegg

[thegoogler]

Seriously, for everything. That, or ive had lots of luck with small local shops, if i need the parts NOW. there always nice about returning stuff, even if its your fault you broke it -_-;;

Only Newegg

[Voxxel]

Exclusively from Newegg [newegg.com]. They are unmatched.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Don't mess around with OEM junk

[Anonymous Coward]

You might think the stuff you buy off of Newegg or ebay or whatever for your own machines works fine and saves you money, but for enterprise-grade server solutions you don't want to mess around with that junk. This isn't a toy; it has to work. The Quake 3 framerate is a lot less important now than whether you can get 24/7 support and service. So just call up Dell or another reputable server vendor; when it comes down to it you save money, no matter what it sounds like now.

Newegg and MonitorsDirect

[Theovon]

I'm going to add my name to the list of many who say "only newegg". It's true. Their return policy is stellar, and it's a snap to return something under warranty on their web site. Sometime you pay a little more (although not much), but it's always worth it.

There is one exception. Newegg is a stickler to the rules for LCD monitors which say the monitor is not defective unless their is some minimum number of dead pixels. The best place to buy monitors is "MonitorsDirect" who will take a monitor for return within 30 days for any reason. (And I took advantage of that to return a monitor with a single dead subpixel!)

Dell corporate

[LittleLebowskiUrbanA]

We have a Dell corporate account and the deals you can get there are amazing provided you're willing to wheel and deal and threaten a bit. Usually you can get upgrades to the server or a nice switch thrown in. I don't buy Dell on the desktop but their servers are good gear and priced right. Plus haggling is fun and I don't have the time to build my own servers.

electroseller.com

[suso]

I just recently bought some rack mount equipment from electroseller.com and had a really good experience. The prices were really good and the service was great.

Plus, they have a nice way of showing you what power supplies and rail kits will work with the case that you are looking at.

I called their customer service to ask a question and someone (a real person) picked up the phone on the first ring. Now that's service.

How About ZipZoomFly?

[selfish]

I used ZipZoomFly [zipzoomfly.com] almost exclusively to build my PC this summer. There's free two day FedEx shipping on tons of stuff, and their prices always seem to be very near or at the top of the list of best-price vendors.

I've never had to return anything to them, so I can't comment there, but do at least check them out next time you're buying PC gear.

NCIX

[Senjutsu]

ncix [ncix.com] is probably the best Canadian online store for this sort of thing.

Re:Newegg and MonitorsDirect

[cosmicpossum]

Monitorsdirect.com WAS a great place to buy LCD monitors. I had 5 on order from them in December when I received an email saying that my orders had been canceled with no charge to me. Subsequently it appears that they are Out Of Business. Sigh...

monarch

[z-pak]

Two part answer. First, I really think its a bad idea to hand build a server that you expect to push. I'm not even in IT but I know just from home systems how much downtime can result from one bad part needing an RMA. Even worse is having to do tech support for your friends or family. I highly reccomend you get your server from a reputable vendor. Time = Money and I wouldn't risk all the time that could be lost if something goes wrong.

That said, I was a long time user of Newegg, but I recently started using www.monarchcomputer.com on reccomendation from a friend as they beat Newegg on price in many cases. They've proven reliable so far. Check both sites and see where the best deal is to be hand if you insist on going the DIY route.

newegg!

[bani]

they're not always the cheapest, but they are almost always near the cheapest.

their shipping is almost always excellent (order friday morning, get it monday afternoon) and inexpensive shipping compared to most other vendors. they must have some sweet deal with their shippers. newegg's return policy is stellar. they always have a good selection of parts in stock.

their online catalogue is really, really good. instead of just regurgitating vendor material, they take the stuff out of the box and photograph it all over so you see exactly what youre getting. afaik the only vendor who does this.

their catalogue browsing is excellent, they let you browse/search by everthing a DIY'er would want to know. chipset, memory speed, form factor, manufacturer, etc.

a lot of products have user comments and ratings, which can be helpful. a lot of other online vendors ripoff newegg's user comments/ratings, which is amusing.

newegg is one of the best online retailers, if not the best period. highly recommended [resellerratings.com]. online vendors could learn a lot from newegg. it's sad that companies as excellent as newegg are very rare. :-(

Re:Cost analysis

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it is definately up. It has just slowed down probably because of the 10/100 ethernet connection on the old iMacs and the relatively slower hard drives in those machines. But it is still accepting connections and delivering the proper pages it appears. This guy was crazy for putting an iMac up for a Slashdotting, but I must say I am impressed with it so far.

Re:Newegg

[happyemoticon]

I sextuple that. Newegg has parts from reputable manufacturers at rock-bottom prices. I especially like the wide availability of OEM hardware, as I have little time to deal with gigantic pretty $20 boxes. Ever since I worked in retail, I learned to hate big boxes, and I still do.

eBay / Dell

[NextAdvantage]

I used to build machines from price watch, but replacement costs and price made me switch to buying used dells on eBay. I always replace the drives throught price watch though...and sell the original drives.

Re:Don't mess around with OEM junk

[Com2Kid]

• This isn't a toy; it has to work.

One good reason to avoid buying name brand.

You spend X dollars on kit from a small vendor, your money went into paying for vendors profit + the hardware.

You spend X dollars on kit from a large vendor like Dell, your money went into paying for

Magazine Ads
TV ads
Newspaper Ads
Corporate Offices
Corporate Staff
A huge fancy database backed website
Vendor profits

and oh yah, also, your hardware.

Now after deductions for all those other bits and pieces are made, how much do you think is going to be left for quality hardware? Granted when buying extremely high level kit from vendors, you do get what you pay for,

barely.

On the other hand, most major name brand equipment uses the cheapest yum-cha equipment money can buy. I would trust a power supply I picked out myself long before I trust one some marketing executive picked out as the cheapest they could get their hands on.

Re:Canadian sources?

[evenmoreconfused]

or tigerdirect.ca

Re:Canadian sources?

[_J_]

For consumer stuff I've yet to see a place with better prices than Canada Computers [canadacomputers.com]

Re:Why Big Blue, of course.

[tmasssey]

My company offers IBM desktops and servers exclusively. We will work with other hardware, of course, and we are both HP and Dell "resellers", but we only offer IBM hardware as part of our quotes.

Not all of the hardware we've gotten from IBM has been the greatest, but on the whole, the quality of IBM's hardware has been at least as good as anything else out there. What *really* keeps us coming back to IBM, though, is the warranty. Their service is unmatched in the industry.

First off, 3 year onsite warranties are standard on the *vast* majority of IBM servers. Second, they can (and, for us, often are) upgraded to 4-hour (or even 2-hour) response warranties. Third, when I call IBM and tell them that a part is dead, they believe me and ship the part immediately. They do as a few logical questions, but the parts get shipped. I'm on the phone maybe 10 minutes total.

Dell, on the other hand, *often* requires me to talk to half a dozen people and take two or more hours just to get them to send the most inexpensive parts (a desktop CD-ROM incident among *several* comes to mind).

I'm not real worried about the quality of IBM equipment for the next six months or so: I figure that most equipment designs are already in the pipeline. However, I'm keeping a *close* eye on the machines we're getting... And if their warranty terms or responsiveness changes, you can be sure we will be ready with alternatives...

I got a free 1U server case out of them

[KalvinB]

I bought a low cost Bow Technology 1U server case and in less than a month the PSU died. Since I'd gone through NewEgg, I figured it'd be nice and easy. I called up, they said they'd be happy to let me just send in the PSU (there's no way I'm shutting down my business over a PSU and had already put a temporary ATX PSU in it's place). 2 Weeks later I hear nothing from them. They had told me to ship the PSU next day and they'd next day the replacement. I checked the RMA and it turns out they're expecting an ATX PSU for some reason. I pointed out the error and after multiple phone calls they finally changed the RMA but still no PSU. Now they want the whole case. I tell them no way and they give me some lie about not having the case in stock anymore (meanwhile the site clearly states the cases will be in stock in a couple days).

Short story we call the Better Business Beurau. NewEgg pulled some shinanigans and got the BBB to close the case as "customer satisfied." Uh, no I'm not. So we call the BBB and tell them we're not at all satisfied as we've got no refund and no PSU.

NewEgg finally pulls their head out of their butt and refunds the entire cost of the case. I had also got the shipping costs refunded for shipping the PSU to them. What's really pathetic is that we called Bow Technology and they had no idea what NewEgg was doing as BT is more than happy to eat the cost of the PSU. NewEgg had zero reason to try to give me the shaft. It wouldn't cost them a dime to replace the part.

NewEgg lost well over $100 on that stupidity alone and I've never bought another part from them. That was over a year ago. Fortunatly my ISP was really cool and allowed my colocated server to run with the top off and an ATX PSU towering over it. Other ISPs would not be so kind.

NewEgg may be nice when things go right but when things go wrong they're idiots. I've found that's the case with quite a few companies.

They're barely off my shit list only because they gave me more than I wanted (I just wanted the PSU), but I'll have to exhaust other options before shopping with them again. This entire episode lasted 3 months and didn't affect me at all. My server was only down from the time the PSU died till I put in the ATX PSU which was only a span of about 2 hours.

As a system admin who just assembled a server..

[Anonymous Coward]

for work instead of the normal ones we order I can offer one piece of solid advice. DON'T DO IT. I've wasted so many hours sourcing components, waiting for things to arrive, putting it together and burning it in. And after all that I'm still worried about it's stability in the long run!

Do yourself a favour and find a vendor who will take a spec for a server, offer there own expert advice and deliver it on time with a support contract.

Please I beg of you, building a reliable server is not in the same realm as building a gaming pc!

Re:Newegg and MonitorsDirect

[Anonymous Coward]

I bought 2 Sony 17 inch LCDs from NewEgg. One had (1) stuck red pixel dead in the middle. They gave me no hassle in RMA'ing it and did not charge me restocking.

I think they understood that a stuck-red pixel dead center is just unignorable. Add that together with the *thousands* of dollars i've spent with them and I think they wanted to take care of me..

They took care of me *before* I had spent thousands. THey truly are, in my perception, a kick-ass company. That's hard to fid these days..

kudos to Newegg! hope they see this

Re:Cost analysis

[txderby]

We are currently putting in a super computing cluster with G5's and love them, so much that we are moving them into our infrastruture side. Also, the Apple XRaid is good but no redun. controllers. We use a ATA Boy for our SAN box and it is great. As far as PC based servers try a company called SAG Electronics (www.sagelec.com). They build there stuff out of components that I would buy and there tech support has been great when I have used them. Hope this helps....

Re:Moderators on drugs?

[damiangerous]

If you had taken the three seconds to do a search on "newegg refurbished fraud," you'd see over 700 pages where most of them discuss their dishonesty.

Not in the first six pages of results you won't. Maybe further, but I wasted enough time. In fact, the closest thing I found was someone who knew he bought a refurbished item that ended up missing a necessary part. He called NewEgg and they refunded his money entirely, including S&H both ways. Not exactly an overwhelming torrent of fraud stories.

Don't hide behind Google, do your own research and give up a link.

Re:Cost analysis

[didde]

I don't know about you guys, but I actually lock my .conf's on a regular basis to prevent accidental input etc.

When we used OS X Server (10.2) as file servers chflags [hmug.org] worked fine from keeping the management software from overwriting smb.conf for example.

This really should be less of a problem in 10.3 now though as Apple are constantly expanding the options available in Server Manager or whatever the app is called.

chflags uchg /etc/smb.conf

...and to unlock...

chflags nouchg /etc/smb.conf

Re:Canadian sources?

[cinc]

How about Directdial http://www.directdial.com/ca/shop/?lang=0 [directdial.com]
or
Acctech http://www.acctech.ca/ [acctech.ca]

I have used both with great success, and they do carry some higher end, server class parts. This with the ones listed above list all the cdn sites I visit when pricing stuff out.

Re:Moderators on drugs?

[volve]

Yeah you're right. Google pulls up 698 results for me and I can't find a single one that even tries to imply NewEgg sold Refurbished parts as New.

The original poster probably works for MonarchComputer.com or something, taking a tip from Microsoft on the wonders of FUD tactics... ;)

Re:Why Big Blue, of course.

[Techiegeeks]

Not all of the hardware we've gotten from IBM has been the greatest, but on the whole, the quality of IBM's hardware has been at least as good as anything else out there. What *really* keeps us coming back to IBM, though, is the warranty. Their service is unmatched in the industry. First off, 3 year onsite warranties are standard on the *vast* majority of IBM servers. Second, they can (and, for us, often are) upgraded to 4-hour (or even 2-hour) response warranties. Third, when I call IBM and tell them that a part is dead, they believe me and ship the part immediately. They do as a few logical questions, but the parts get shipped. I'm on the phone maybe 10 minutes total.

This is the truth. My company also uses only IBM Servers and Desktops (Cisco Only for network), and their support and warranty is incredible. There 4 hour respones times are great. When I call for support, someone immediately answers my call.

If you need a server that's mission critical, IBM is a great way to go.

Re:Canadian sources?

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a company that specializes in RAM. They are in Victoria, BC and go by the name of CanadaRam [canadaram.com].

Server death

[Glonoinha]

That said - if the OP is going to build his own, he is going to build his own. If that's the case, here is the most important bit of wisdom I have to offer :

Heat Kills.

Computers die for one reason, and one reason only. Heat. I have autopsied well over 100 dead computers (servers, desktops) in the past two decades and with extremely few exceptions the deaths were caused by CPU fan failure (a $10 part), power supply fan failure (a $10 part), or hard drive failure. If I really wanted to push it, I would say the drive failures were heat related, generally due to weak power supply exhaust fans.

Heat kills. It doesn't matter where you buy your parts if you are building your own systems (hey, we all did it early in our careers when money was more scarce than time) then spend the extra eight dollars to get the best CPU fan you can find, get top quality fans pulling air into the machine, and get top quality fans pushing air out of the machine.

Heat kills. Don't overclock your servers, and don't go for the fastest of anything. Insure there is airflow space between your drives and make sure the room your machines are in is cool. Maybe even consider underclocking your CPU - a machine running 80% as fast but giving you an extra two years of uninterrupted uptime is a lot better than a server running 105% and dying at a rate of two hardware failures a year.

If you are hand building, build conservative machines and buy identical spare parts while you still can. Nothing sucks more than having to retire a machine because you can't get spare parts, except replacing a machine because a $10 cheapo fan stopped blowing.