anyone running gulftown / westmere

[Patrick]

@Patrick
and while I am at it... Pat.. I remember when servethehome was actually about HOME users and reviewed and discussed setups for HOME and SMALL BUSINESS .. now your just a shill for enterprise.. not a single article on the home page in years that actually talks to the title of the website of serving the home...

rant out

First off, I do not care if folks run Westmere-EP. If you have it, go for it. I run plenty of older systems just because they are there, especially on the embedded side. Usually, after a system hits 5-7 years I start thinking of replacing them just from a reliability perspective. I do think at some point it is wise to look at newer systems. You mentioned limitations on going to ESXi 7 so at some point, the trade-offs get more extreme and Westmere is starting to hit that age. Again, no big deal here if you have it, but I personally would struggle to buy a new-to-me Westmere system in 2021.

I like that people are thinking about an EOL, but I also get the fact that you are just trying to get an answer for what you have on ESXi.

On the rant, since I got tagged, OK I will bite. You are correct STH has grown. Somewhat similar to how the Wall Street Journal covers more than just one road in New York City. 11.5 years later, a publication is bound to expand. Anandtech and Toms have not had Anand or Tom for many years and they did not shut down when founders left.

On the "not a single article", I am confused here:

• Today: Xeon E-2236 which is very much in a home/ SMB server segment, right?
• Yesterday: Running a RTX 3070 for compute instead of a Tesla/ Quadro seems very home/ SMB server segment to me
• Monday: Dmitrij's MikroTik router review is for a home/ SMB brand router
• Dec 31-Jan 3 we did tests of 5GbE USB 3.1 adapters. I think those are very home/ SMB appropriate
• 7 out of the first 9 on the home page seem very home/ SMB centric. The QNAP is certainly a SMB but not home NAS. The ASRock embedded motherboard is fair enough, but we have been doing the embedded space for years.
• We have been running an entire series for over 6 months on used TinyMiniMicro nodes with 20+ articles in that series now

You are correct that we do new items as well. Many of those end up being used items in the future. I appreciate feedback, but I am completely perplexed on the notion that we have no coverage for home/ SMB. I am looking at the last two weeks of coverage and wondering if we have enough non-home/ SMB coverage to hit the mix I want and so it is surprising to hear that we have "not a single article" designed for that.

Just for the record, traffic-wise, we absolutely dwarf the hardware review sites that are actual enterprise shills. Even though we are a server-focused which is a much smaller niche, we actually are only about 30% smaller than the Register (excluding STH YouTube) but with a (very) small fraction of the revenue. About every quarter I get some group looking to buy STH because they see our relatively simplistic and few ads and traffic and think they can just swap over to news (you can do about 100-400 news stories for one STH server review these days), add auto-play video ads and such, and make a fortune. Every time I listen to the pitch all I think about is that if I sell out and the new owners go after the easy money there will no longer be any truly independent server-focused review sites out there. For some perspective, I am trading 80-100 hour work weeks doing STH versus basically retiring at this point because of that feeling of responsibility.