Longest?

[Newtun]

Note from the amateur/"cheap seats" :

My oldest build is still going strong after 17 years. Or at least, still going (from my World Community Grid result summary):

​

Pentium e5200, overclocked 28%, from 2.5 GHz to ≈3.2 GHz; (which I had to lower from 3.5 GHz late in 2012).

I'm guessing that this is the oldest semi-continuously running PC among our membership.

 

[LunarMist]

I had an E7200 that was purchased to troubleshoot a board and gave that to someone, but it is long gone now.

None of my computers run anywhere near continuously. During pandemon icu I recycled all the older desktops and a few ancient laptops that had just been accumulating. I'm sure the Sedorkian has some hardware that is older than he is, but the oldest stuff I have that MIGHT work is a 900MHx Pentium M laptop with a tiny screen.

 

[jtr1962]

Probably. My record was the ~10 years I got out of my XP3200 system. I'm 6 years into my current system. So far it easily meets my needs, so no upgrade fever. Given that I recently bought a laptop, I can use that for things my current system can't handle. So I might be keeping my current desktop build for a long time, unless it breaks.

Does that system still have the original HDDs? I might have the record here for longest continuously running HDD. The 2TB Samsung in my system has 119,501 hours on it as of right now. That's about 13 years, 8 months.

I have much older machines, but they were never in continuous use. I even have an 8086 which probably dates from the mid 1980s. I found it by the curb.

BTW, at first I thought this might be a thread about penis sizes.

 

[LunarMist]

There is no need to be vulgar. He could change the title to "Longest Running System?"
My first thoughts were about network cable length or possibly Wi-Fi signal distance.
UPS run time is my nemesis, so I always want it to be longer (in hours).

 

[jtr1962]

Being that it was in the Cafe instead of the Computer section, that was the first thought to come to mind. Didn't someone on SR start a "How big is it?" thread? Kind of silly and juvenile I guess, but boys will be boys. The thread disappeared of course when they had the database meltdown.

 

[jtr1962]

UPS run time is my nemesis, so I always want it to be longer (in hours).

Have you ever considered having a big external battery? Being that I have a few UPSes where the battery went south, I'm thinking of this. Don't want to get another SLA battery which will crap out in a few years. Instead, my thoughts are to use some of the ~500 surplus A123 26650s I have. Make a 12V LiFePO4 battery with a BMS, then connect it to to the same terminals as the SLA was connected to. The sky would be the limit as far as capacity. I could do something like an 8P4S battery to give me 20Ah and 12V, for example. Enough to run my system for probably 5 hours. I would just have to keep the charging voltage under about 14V if the UPS doesn't already limit it to that.

 

[fb]

I'm not even close, I built 3 or 4 machines at work around late 2013-2014, I was away for 5 years so 1 or 2 probably got decommissioned when we changed owners, but 2 are running legacy software, runs 24/7 and are still going strong. (Fractal Design Define cases, Seasonic PSUs, ASUS TUF motherboards, 16 GB Kingston RAM, Samsung Pro SSDs and i74700 CPUs).

 

[Newtun]

Does that system still have the original HDDs?

Yes, two 160 GB Seagate Barracudas. I had the idea to have a separate /home disk, thinking that might cut down on overall seek time.

 

[Newtun]

There is no need to be vulgar.

How Long Is It?

 

[ddrueding]

I think the oldest piece of gear that I have running here is from the launch of the 2080, so 5 years ago. Older stuff is still running elsewhere, but was gifted and no longer monitored or managed by me.

 

[sdbardwick]

I'm responsible for a Dell file server from around 2001 that supports a custom database application from 2004. Its a Pentium 4 2.1 GHz with IIRC 256MB SDRAM and mirrored 160GB PATA drives running Windows Server 2003. IIRC the drives were replaced around 2010. It really just sits there basically at idle, as there are only 2 database users and only gets "stressed" once a month for an invoice generation operation. It often has uptimes in excess of 1 year; only power failures in excess of the 1 hour runtime of the attached UPS take it down. Recently a SDGE transformer failure ended a 18 month uptime. The battery in the UPS just died, but I am scared to bring the system down to replace it; so I'll just wait until a power event takes it down for me.

 

[LunarMist]

Why would you have to turn it off to replace the UPS battery; is it just the physical location?

 

[sdbardwick]

First, the official instructions for replacement state to disconnect UPS from power source before replacing battery - it is a higher end consumer APC model, not a datacenter one with external batteries. Also, if I were 25 years younger I could probably manage the contortions to manage the in situ battery exchange. I guess I'll take a closer look and see if there is enough slack in various cables; IIRC the UPS battery pack is one of those with two standard sized SLA taped together.

I'll just do a backup before trying anything; the boot drive is a 80GB PATA and I still have OEM install CD's and several copies of other install media. Can rebuild from bare steel in about 4 hours if needed. Even have a twin of the original server (except one harvested cooling fan) still in storage to use for parts. Been meaning to swap the box out for at least a SATA SSD capable box for the past decade or so, but risk/reward/laziness conspires against messing with a setup that works and is still quick enough for everyday use.

 

[ddrueding]

I used to have a bunch of servers running like that. They seemed to fail most during a restart or backup routine. Eventually migrated them all to VMs. If they were the only server I migrated them to a VM on one of the desktops. Much easier to backup a VM than bare metal.

 

[sdbardwick]

Agreed. If I can virtualize my setup, that would be ideal, but I am hardly a virtualization expert. I do have another newer entry level Dell Xeon server set aside for just that, if I can ever get my posterior in gear.

 

[Mercutio]

I have a Netware 4 system I have to keep running until the end of September. It was probably new in about 1996, but at least it's not running on its original hardware any more. It's currently a Core 2 Duo an Intel 945 motherboard, which is what we can comfortably call old ass hardware.

 

[Newtun]

Notes from Underground (the bargain basement): this past Wednesday, I tried to log on to my home-built 17⅜-year-old PC to check for security updates, but there was a problem - the screen was only showing on the bottom half, in a real big font.

It turned out that it couldn't support my over-clocking settings any more, and was running slowly and strangely.

Originally, I had O/C'ed the 2.5 GHz chip to about 3.5 GHz, a ≈40% increase, but that failed after about 4¼ years. (See the table below.)

So I had turned it down to 3.19 GHz (a 27.6% overclock), and that ran OK for about 11⁵⁄₉ years, until Wednesday.

After working on the details in the boot-up BIOS screen for a good number of reboots, I was able to get it running again on a slightly slower O/C, 3.15 GHz. That's still a 26% increase over the default.

So I hope that keeps running OK for a long time. And I updated my O/C spreadsheet:

Date​	Purchase​	Days​	Months​	Years​	FSB MHz​	CPU Multiplier​	CPU O/C MHz​	CPU Default MHz​	% MHz Increase​
11/27/24​	Pentium E5200 Wolfdale 2.5GHz Dual-Core Processor​	4​	0.13​	0.01​	300​	10.5​	3150​	2500​	26.0%​
05/05/13​	Pentium E5200 Wolfdale 2.5GHz Dual-Core Processor​	4224​	138.78​	11.56​	319​	10​	3190​	2500​	27.6%​
02/03/09​	Pentium E5200 Wolfdale 2.5GHz Dual-Core Processor​	1552​	50.99​	4.25​	319​	11​	3509​	2500​	40.4%​
07/12/07​	Core 2 Duo E4300 Allendale 1.8GHz Processor​	572​	18.79​	1.57​	335​	7​	2345​	1800​	30.3%​
07/19/07​	GIGABYTE GA-965P-DS3 Intel P965 Intel Mobo​	6345​	208.46​	17.37​	​	​	​	​	​

 

[ddrueding]

Yup, long gone are the days of that kind of free performance. As the engineering becomes more science and less art, all the margins are squeezed out. Same with lots of things, bridges come to mind.