this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2023
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No one does maintenance on the server farms. It costs more money to send someone in than to let the parts slowly die until the farm no longer is economically viable. Once that happens, you sell the whole farm to a recycler.
That sounds monumentally more wasteful.
But it is cheaper.
The most sustainable option would also always be the cheapest option, if regulations were properly designed to correct for externalized costs. We should strive for that.
It might be the most sustainable option.
Building a server farm that needs to be maintained means building out space for people to maintain the farm, increasing the space and requiring additional cooling to make the farm able to be serviced by humans.
It also means that less efficient hardware gets used for a longer period of time, driving up electricity costs.
And as long as the e-waste is recycled, in which it is easier to recycle an entire farm rather than consumer electronics, what is the issue?
I can tell you that big data centers likely have a 4 year hardware cycle, where it is all under warranty and service contract.
After which, it gets sold to refurbishers who refurb it and resell it. Or the datacenter may repurpose it for labs, OOB hardware, or donate it to schools.
A lot of smaller companies don't need the latest and greatest, and are quite happy running old 2nd hand hardware.
Even after they are done with it, there are plenty of hobbyists that will buy it. I have a couple 8 year old servers that run absolutely fine for what I need.
Old servers are also kept around as parts for companies that refuse to update old hardware (and will just keep buying spares, or like-for-like replacements).
The last step is ewaste, where the good stuff gets boiled in acid to extract the gold, or whatever they do.
The only things that are generally destroyed during hardware cycles are the storage, and that's normally for compliance reasons.
For microsoft at the expense of the fucking planet.
This is common practice for any large data center.
No it isn't. What DC do you work at? We recycle hardware as much as fucking possible until its worthless and then it's sold to anyone who wants it in the company first and then the rest is sold on ebay and craigslist.
Ahhh, so this is why you are so angry in this thread. You're the competition. Not exactly an unbiased third party.
@snowbell having fun #trolling ? Or just a bit lacking in holding the #environment as a core personal worldview/value-set ? If you did, I think you might immediately have understood— as I did — that the other person has 1. a strong ethos around the environment, which dovetails with 2. their strong sense of professionalism.
It’s the difference between friendly competition whom one actually can RESPECT (even when you disagree), vs seeing the other party as a literal piece of turd-pile because the treat their stakeholders like turds.
M$ is extremely well known for being the latter.
Also, I doubt that someone at the engineer-level (low on the totem pole) is seriously going to give two f***s about their multinational richass CEOs or investors “competing” with each other.
I sure as sh*t wouldn’t. It’s just a money game. Zero loyalty
(as any corporate drone knows (see also Dilbert comic strip).)
Datacenters are already bad for the environment and all available evidence points to this being a better option for the environment. Believe me I thought it was the stupidiest shit when they first announced this but I've had years to think about it now. Just because something is made by a horrible company doesn't mean that it iself must be horrible.
Sorry for not participating in your corporate drone culture, loyalty actually matters to me. This comment made me cringe.
What's the difference between recycling one piece at a time or en mass?
One hasn't been corroded by the ocean.
The actual computer parts wouldn't necessarily be corroded though, I would assume the hull itsself would be designed to last longer than the computer components themselves
Yes we all know that designs are always perfect and never stupid or wasteful for greenwashing and marketing.
Same for wind, solar, geothermal, nuclear energy generation then?
I mean not really because the computers in the farm at this point are recycled to be sold as seperate used units.