Following on from a previous post relating to the death of my HP ML115 G5 server, I’ve been busy on eBay over the last few days looking for a replacement. As a result, I’ve managed to secure not one but two used ML115 G5s.

The first is exactly the same model as my original with the quad core Opteron 1352 CPU albeit having been upgraded to 8GB RAM and with a new 250GB hard drive to replace the original 160GB drive. It’s in very good condition and looks like it’s been well looked after. I managed to get this for £120 as a Best Offer which seems to be a typical sort of price for a good condition ML115 G5. It’s a little more than I wanted to pay but I don’t mind too much given that it has 8GB RAM which would probably cost £30-£40 anyway.

The second was a last minute purchase which was too good an opportunity to miss. It’s a dual core Opteron 1214 model with 1GB RAM and separate video and sound cards and a Hansol LCD monitor which has actually been used as a cheap desktop machine, but I managed to get this all for the princely sum of only £31. What a bargain! The auction for this started with an initial bid of £30 or a Buy It Now of £50. After a couple of email exchanges with the seller to confirm details of the item I was just about to go for the Buy It Now option when someone actually placed a £30 bid and the Buy It Now option disappeared! Bad eBay timing again! However, as it turned out I managed to win the auction in the end with a bid of only £31, so I actually saved myself £19 on what I was prepared to pay. I will most likely replace the dual core CPU in this model with the quad core from my original and may get an extra 4GB RAM to add to my original 4GB so that I end up with two equivalent 8GB models.

So all in all I’m pretty pleased with how things have turned out.

Next step is to get one of the ML115s configured as my main server again. More on this later…