Longevity of tech equipment
This post is inspired by my NAS HDD that has just spun its last spin. After 9.5y of 24/7 Service, the WD Red 4TB is off to the graveyard. It was clicking and whirring, the temperature 21c higher than the other three it shared a chassis with. It's done well, now rest in peace.
Then I looked at the 11yr old MacBook sitting underneath my 6yr old Lenovo laptop. Hmm, also aged but still working. A little bit of OpenCore Legacy Patcher and it's still grinding for test work, albeit a little slow even with a SSD. Then my home built PC running Debian. It is a 2018 built with a MSI motherboard and AM4 socket. The CPU was upgraded 6 months ago for the last time. No other changes though and it's still wicked fast. This box also runs a VM with all my sea sailing, Jellyfin, encodes all my media to AV1, and is also my daily driver. It's a wonderful box.
Hardware lasts a long time now in our world. There's no need for a 2 year bin off of phones, or a 3 year PC cycle that Dell would have believe. In heavy business, I understand the need for faster machines for business software, but for the average Joe, it's really not.
Anyway, what are your tech aged devices you still use, and why haven't you updated them?
I used to work in electronics recycling. I did a variety of things, but my last job in the industry was stress testing PC components for resale. I was neck deep in CPUs and DIMMs and laptop and desktop motherboards all day long, and I came away from it with a healthy respect for the hardiness of components from the last decade when compared to those that came before.
For a time you could get excellent hardware for dirt cheap if you knew how to pick parts and throw it all together, but lately it seems like resellers have twigged that a lot of older hardware is still perfectly serviceable, and many components aren't depreciating as quickly as they once did.
Anyway, my oldest working machine now is a Dell Optiplex 790 with an i7-2700 and 16GB DDR3. I think the memory clocks at 1333MHz, but it's been a while since I've given a thought to it, so I might be misremembering. It's running an out-of-date but still supported version of Linux Mint with Cinnamon desktop. I got the computer gratis for volunteering with a recycler, and I've only put maybe $150 into it in upgrades, not counting hand-me-down GPUs I've pulled from other machines when upgrading them.
It does everything I ask it to, which is admittedly not much. Mostly I use that machine for media storage and playback because I prefer multimedia to be sandboxed away from gaming, which i do on another machine.
Mostly I haven't done bothered to upgrade it because it still does everything I want it to. I may decide to figure another solution out for its role in the future, but money's tight right now, and there's nothing pressing me to take action. It just keeps chugging away.
You're speaking directly to me, in a time when I'm looking at all these devices worrying that they're doomed to fail.
My QNAP TS4-12 has been spinning away it's 4x1TB WD Reds for more than 11 years. I've been seriously considering its replacement these last few months, but what I'll probably do is setup a solution in parallel, and see how long it can go. Maybe in 10 more years the parallelized solution will fail, and it'll turn out that this one is in fact immotal.
Hardware is usually fine, problem is software long term support.
My gaming/hobby PC is getting pretty long in the tooth these days. Originally built in 2011 using an Intel 2600k, two GTX 580s, a custom test-bench case (DangerDen if anyone remembers them) and massive custom watercooling loop. Over the years I've upgraded the SSD/HDD's many times and in 2018 I swapped the GTX 580 SLi setup for an 8GB RTX 2070 when 1.5GB of VRAM was no longer viable.
Thanks to an aggressive overclock, gaming at 1080p and not playing the latest AAA titles I've not really had a huge reason to upgrade. Remembering how quickly computers were considered obsolete in the 90's and early 00's I wanted to see if I could make this machine last a decade. Now that we're a few years beyond that there are some sentimental reasons partially responsible for holding me back from an upgrade. This machine and I have done so much work together, crunched countless numbers, made lots of art and it has been the main game server hub for my friends that I am finding it difficult to power it down and say goodbye.
Also with the cost of building a new, fancy computer right now replacing it is not feasible, unfortunately.
I have a Synology DS213 that's 12 years old and still getting OS and software updates. I did replace WD Red drives with HGST since I got part of a bad WD batch. But for spinning disks, the Synology NAS unit has been a monster of reliability. No bad updates, never a problem. Actually, it did throw fan warnings last year, but a gentle tap and it was fine again. It's gone through four moves, so the fact that it's still working is just bonus time.
Are you still on the original power supply for the Synology ? I have a DS916+ that I had to replace the power supply on 3 times - the original one died after around 4 years (which seems to be par for the course for these), and none of the replacements lasted more than 2 years.. so annoying. I finally got a 12V supply from a Dell SFF computer with a fan/active cooling and much more robust design, replacing the connector with one that fits the Synology - hopefully this will last, it's rated for a lot more power as well than required by the Synology which should help.
Still annoying how poor the Synology power supplies are. I have a collection of old Atari 8-bit computers from 1979-1990 and the power bricks they used on those still work after 30-40 years, why can't Synology make a power brick that will last more than 4 years...
I lived in Florida, the lightning strike capital of the world, so I religiously kept the thing plugged into the best surge suppressors I could get, replaced regularly. Never had an issue with the power brick.
It's surprising how bad U.S. power quality is in many places, how vulnerable most devices are to voltage spikes and brownouts, and how little people are aware of this risk.
I do keep my homelab on beefy surge protection and also live somewhere where lightning storms only happen once every 2-3 years, and between my computer homelab and home music studio with probably close to a 100 different power bricks I never have issues with equipment failure due to surge or brownouts.
It is possible back in 2013 Synology still used quality power supplies, or perhaps the 4 bay unit supplies are undersized for the load (the startup load of 4 HDDs can technically draw more current than the stock supply is specced for) The 4 bay DS916+ comes with 8.33A (100W) power supply vs 5A (60W) for the 2 bay DS213, so it's possible the DS213 one has little more headroom and also runs cooler which might extend it's lifespan (the DS916+ one runs quite hot)
After my experience, I am genuinely impressed you got 12+ years out of yours !
I am hoping the fan cooled 16A (200W) rail on the Dell power supply is sufficiently overkill to last the rest of the Synology's life.. (not to mention the Dell supply cost me $10 used, vs Synology charging ridiculous $60+ for the replacement 100W brick that's just going to die again in a few years)
I have a DS215 that I bought second hand a few years ago and it's still trucking. It's a little too underpowered to run more than a few apps, and it mostly serves as a dumping ground for important docs, backups, etc. But the thing is damn reliable.
Ha, just my kind of topic!
I use a 2009 MacPro as my Windows gaming PC. Last weekend I upgraded the video card to a 1080, unbelievable that’s still possible! Nothing fast, but it can still play the games I’m interested in.
This year I replaced a 13” 2012 MacBook Pro with a M3 MacBook Air. Although the new laptop is a great upgrade, I severely doubt it will ever reach the 12 year mark. That makes me sad and I think this will be my last MacBook because of this.
My wife is still on another 2012 MacBook Pro we have in the house. She doesn’t feel like an upgrade is necessary. The battery is definitely done, but otherwise I understand.
Then there’s a first generation iPad Air that’s mostly used as a remote for a first generation AppleTV, which hosts all music. There’s actually three of those old AppleTVs, they are there as corpses to pick parts from.
Lastly, there’s an array of Raspberry PIs, ranging from the first one to the 4. One is a remote backup server, 2 are part of a smart home setup and one is NAS/media server/shared calendar/everything else. There are two more, be they currently don’t have a purpose.
I adore old tech. Things in my house that are still used:
I'd say that I'm still highly reliant on modern hardware (I work remotely in a tech role, for example), but outside of work over the past 10 years I've become significantly less wrapped up in the internet and being "online." I quit social media a long time ago and have collected books and old software about topics I'm interested in, and generally look to those first with the internet as a supplement. I'm surrounded by tech, but most of it is ancient and configured to do one specific thing well, with a high bar for getting off-task.
Underrated comment. Colour me impressed. What is your human-interface for a machine of this age/calibre?
Likewise for the other 486. I'm curious what kind of disk-drive it would possibly be operating on.
FoxPro is actually great for the interface part. It's a database, but it's also a visual form builder/program builder. Think like those old POS systems you'd see in shops or video rental stores or something where they'd have a custom interface on an old amber screen. Many of those business-specific interfaces were likely designed with and ran on FoxPro. The setup in my garage is just the old machine in the corner, CRT, old grimy keyboard basically.
As for the disk drives, I use CF cards for those. Just simple 3.5" IDE to CF adapters running Transcend Industrial CF cards that get detected as regular IDE drives. I do have a fair number of working era-appropriate drives, but don't feel like trusting (or listening to) those. The 2.5" for the TI laptop in particular is just plain loud and power-hungry, so giving it a CF card makes it operate silently and last for way longer on its (still functional!) Ni-Cd batteries.
My gaming/workstation PC's hardware slowly gets "retired" into my home server. In some cases that ends up being a little silly, like I had what would have counted as a high end gaming GPU a decade ago being used to render a text login console twice a year. I did eventually replace that with a new lower-midrange GPU, partly because of codec support and partly because the difference in power usage (especially idle power usage) meant breaking even in about 18 months.
Other than that, I replaced a bunch of old seagate hard drives after failure (avg lifespan a not very impressive 6 years), a bunch of fans (I'd guess a 20% failure rate over 5 years) and a corsair power supply that failed after 10 years, but the rest is still in operation.
My beloved 2013 iMac 27 inch is still going strong!! It's in rough shape, the screen is duct taped on and it's missing the WiFi antenna so Ethernet only. I had it running a patched version of ventura for awhile but it was pretty unstable, I have Catalina on it right now but I've been meaning to switch it over to Linux. honorable mention to my 4th gen iPod touch that plays rain sounds at night for my dog and my og wii.
I still have a TiVo Premiere XL that has been running non-stop since 2010 (14 years now) recording TV shows. The original 1TB HDD (WD10EVVS) in the TiVo was still going strong 2 years ago when I upgraded it to a new 8TB one which brings it up to almost 1300 hour HD recording capacity. The original fan is even still working, basically having been running 24/7 for 14 years now - I am quite impressed how well this thing has been designed and built. Spectrum is still letting me use a CableCARD, although they have long stopped issuing them to new customers - so now it's a race between either the TiVo kicking the bucket, or Spectrum finally shutting off the few remaining CableCARD customers they have at this point, it will be kind of a sad day for me either way.
I also have a collection of various 8-bit Atari home computers (earliest is from 1979, latest around 1990) most of which still work (I do have a lot of spares and spare parts which I accumulated back in the day to keep them going) - but those are mostly for nostalgia, I don't really use them as much anymore.
Oh boy, my people!
Probably the newest piece of hardware I use on the regular is my ThinkPads X1 Nano, which is about three years old and has recently been upgraded with a 2Tb SSD. I also have an older (not sure how old) Radeon 5500XT eGPU I plug into it for gaming.
And actually, guess I lied, I have a Steam Deck, which is 2 and a half years old.
Other than that, I have a gaming PC I built in 2019 that I upgraded last year with a Ryzen 5600 and a Radeon 6700XT, which will probably be its configuration for the next five years at least.
But the most frequently used stuff in my house is much older. I have a gaming laptop from 2016 that gets used every day, a Thinkserver TS140 with a Xeon... E3-something or other and a 750 Ti that also gets used daily. Both by the kids for gaming.
I have a new PC I put together out of old scrap hardware with an i7-7700, 1070 GTX that is my HTPC and living room gaming PC. My wife and I have been playing Dead Space Remake on that.
I'm my garage I have an old Dell with a Prentium 4 that I use for Google and looking at manuals when I'm doing automotive work; though I haven't used it in awhile, so I was thinking about turning it into a retro gaming PC.
A RaspPi 3 that is being used as in my arcade cabinet.
Then I have a collection of old handhelds, some of which don't get used, but I do still use my Nintendo DS, 3DS and PS Vita.
I recently reacquired an old Sandy Bridge i5 system that is sitting in my office, waiting to be used for something.
Edit: forgot my old Thinkpad T480s from 2018, which I gave to my wife. She uses it daily for music and games
Consoles, totally forgot them. They don’t seem to age the same way other computer hardware does. They are in their own time capsules, since they never need to run anything they weren’t designed to run.
On that topic though, of the old consoles we have laying around, the 3DSes definitely get used the most. The kids frequently choose them over mobile games or the Switch. I’ve also taken a 3DS on my commute, using it on the train is perfect!
My mum still has a first generation green screen Gameboy that she only plays Tetris on. I'm sure that cartridge is now dust wedged into it.
i have a lenovo t450s thats basically my media center, and by "media center" i mean i threw fedora on there and i basically use it as a youtube/nebula/personal cloud storage media machine with the occasional foray to the high seas.
The lenovo's predecessor was a samsung laptop from 2010-ish? It had no screen, no backplate, the battery was held in place with electrical tape, and and the only reason i had to get rid of it last year was because it drowned during a water heater incident and sadly didnt turn back on even after i dried it out.
i also have an old kindle 2 somewhere, the kind with a physical keyboard. I got it secondhand off of woot back in like 2012, and its been happily chugging away ever since. Presumably it still turns on lol
Edit: Saw someone else mention their 3DS - That too! it doesn't hold a charge very well but other than that it works just fine.
The oldest equipment I still use is my Iphone 8. Its still in near perfect condition, is fast enough, still gets security updates. I’m hoping to have it for a few more years.
I dont like the new iphones so I’m not sure what I’ll replace it with. Maybe if the SE is still around I’ll go with that.
I use Linux everywhere else but I’m not really a big fan of Android, those devices tend to be way more than I need and come with a ton of bloatware.
Ha, an iPhone 8. So up-to-date! ;-)
I have a first-gen SE that I bought (refurbished) in 2019. Very little issues, apart from one or two apps that require newer iOS versions. And the cameras have degraded a bit due to condensation inside, making photos in bright light a bit fuzzy. I'm dreading the day that it breaks, though. Current day phones are way too big for my taste.
My iPad mini from 2014 is also still fine for daily use. Although that one is running into more and more websites that refuse to display/run properly because of some apparent javascript incompatibility with the older iOS version, let alone apps. For most of what I want to read, it's still perfectly OK, though.
Fun topic, btw. Good to see so many tech unthusiasts that actively aim not to upgrade until necessary :-)
Oh man! You got me beat on daily drivers -
But I still use my Iphone 4s at home because it has Alien Blue on it. It cant load images, but works otherwise!
I have bought Core i5 750 in 2010 (or was it 11?) and used it since 2021 (or 22) when I uograded for free to i5-3470. I have only recently upgraded to i5-4690 for 45€ (CPU and motherboard) because I needed the older i5 elsewhere. This hardware is still perfectly fine for my use - I run lightweight Linux and don't do heavy workload. I could use faster hardware when re-encoding Blu ray rips and when calculating 3D printing (slicing) but boh of these can just run and be done once they are done. Then there are games and since I have GTX1650, these CPUs were fine, no need for faster. So we could say I lasted and still go strong on decade plus old hardware. There is no need to spend money on new things and throw out perfectly fine and working older hardware.
Harddisks - Two years back I stopped my 24/7 NAS that run since 2013. Both HDDs were working great when I turned it off for good. I did this because I was upgrading from RAID1 to RAID5 and also upgrading other things, simply put I was building new NAS. I don't use the HDDs anymore as they were running more than 9 years and while there were no errors or problems, I don't trust them after all that time.
I have also used other HDDs in RAID1 elsewhere and they lasted for quite some time as well, but I believe one of them died after say 7 years and the other short time after. Data survived as I did rebuild in between. Those were first generation WD Green (awful!) and I'm surprised they lasted so long.
My current NAS has 7200rpm NAS HDDs. I think I may be swapping them out for bigger ones before they fail. I suppose they will go for at least 8 years simply based on my own experience.
There is no reason to upgrade fast. I have recommended several times to my friends to buy used office PCs and notebooks. They are dirt cheap and still pack a punch for standard desktop use. And they have 80Plus Gold power supplies (most of the time), which just adds up on efficiency together with their price. Why buy new PC for hefty price when several years older one will be just a bit slower for 20% of the price? We are talking about subjective speed of Average Joe use, not benchmarka of course.
Reusing old hardware is a bit of a hobby of mine!
I still have a laptop that was bought in 2008 that's running as a server. I've replaced the hard drive and CPU fan, but I'm proud to report it's still going.
I have a desktop that I replaced the hard drive to that's been going since 2010-ish. It's actually not running at the moment but I've thought about repurposing it.
Then I have a 2015-ish laptop that I was daily driving until I got my framework a couple of years ago. I've considered spinning it back up to have some persistent apps running at home that I can remote into, like an IRC client and things like that.
Forgot to mention 10 years with a Linksys WRT54G wireless router, going through various generations of DD-WRT and Tomato firmware. It was perfect for iptables, jacking up the power output (added a parabolic antenna array) and bridging to another access point, thoroughly covering a concrete-block ranch house in Florida.
That router is still not dead, just hopelessly obsolete (no 802.11ac 5 GHz bands) and now residing in a box of "emergency fallback" things.
My devices are nowhere near as aged as yours, but I feel like I am doing a decent job at improving. I have an iPhone 14 Pro, which is 2 years old now, and an iPad Pro 5th gen that is also 2 years old. I have much less disposable income right now, but even if I did I wouldn’t be upgrading. The iPad is perfect for what I use it for (watching videos, movies, and TV). The fancy oled screen on the new version seems cool, but the screen on mine is still really good and I only rarely see the bloom issues. The only thing I don’t like about my phone is lightning. I have almost upgraded just to have usb c when the 15 and 16 came out, but the thing keeping me on the 14 is the crappy colors of the new ones. The pro models have been some variation of grey or brown since the 14. My 14 is a beautiful rich purple color, which is my favorite color. If Apple releases a purple pro phone, that may be enough to get me to upgrade, but without that, I will probably stick to this phone until the 18 or 19, so 4 or 5 years total.