Disassembling a Dell Server from 2000

On Thursday October 28th, I spent the entire day in a CJLX production studio taking apart obsolete broadcast equipment and salvaging their still useful parts.

In the morning, I finished disassembling a switching circuit from a reel-to-reel tape deck I had worked with weeks earlier. Several toggle switches and button switches were salvaged from the circuit. Tim says they will be very much in demand by maintenance and other faculty members. Next, I took apart an archaic audio amplifier from which I salvaged some potentiometers, capacitors, and fuses.

I spent the entire afternoon taking apart an obsolete but still functioning ten year old Dell server that was decommissioned in 2006. Among the most interesting parts I found were three high wattage power supplies that were designed to fail over to one of two backup power supplies should the active supply fail. The large motherboard contained at least 6 RAM slots containing 128 MB and 256 MB RAM sticks that added up to 1.25 GB of RAM. By today's standards, this would not amount to much RAM, but in 2000 it was an incredibly large amount. The processor was an Intel Pentium III which again would be very slow by today's standards, but in 2000 would have ranked among the fastest processors available. There were three or four 160 GB hard drives in a RAID array designed to temporarily absorb a single drive failure with a low probability of data loss. I can see why this server was decommissioned in 2006 as the storage space and processing resources in it would at best barely meet CJLX' current needs without any room for data expansion or failure of any kind. That said there are components within the system unit that today are still quite functional that can be put to other uses.

By the time I had finished disassembling the server, I had completed an additional seven hours toward my twenty-five volunteer hour commitment. This brings my total practicum hours to eight and half, with sixteen and a half hours remaining. With the semester more than half over, I need to make sure I complete at least four hours each week this month.