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How long do servers usually last?

I know there are many factors involved to determine the life expectancy of a server. As far as I know it is guaranteed for 3 years but a server can live much longer after the official warranty before it become faulty. So I if you think the question is subjective, let's put it this way: In average, for how long did you have your Dell Poweredge R200 (or any server of the same family) before a fault appeared in some hardware? And what hardware was that?

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I will. Actually you are the second to remind me, but I would not hesitate to accept helpful answers :) – alfish Apr 20 '11 at 1:46
While the above links are certainly relevant and can be useful, but I think my question still worth stay separately because it narrows down the scope. – alfish Apr 20 '11 at 10:04
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closed as exact duplicate by Jim B, Ward, coredump, GregD, Iain♦ Apr 20 '11 at 6:45

This question covers exactly the same ground as earlier questions on this topic; its answers may be merged with another identical question. See the FAQ for guidance on how to improve it.

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Anecdotally-speaking, for a general-purpose Dell/HP/IBM server in a consistently-cooled/powered environment, you'll either have something fail right away within the first day/week like RAM (usually right away), PSU(s), or hard drives perhaps within a few months, followed more rarely by RAID controller/motherboards several years after deployment (blown caps; was an issue several years ago with some boards manufactured by one particular Taiwanese firm IIRC).

Again, I'm grossly generalizing here, but the stuff that goes wrong during manufacture/assembly will usually crop up shortly after deployment. For example, harddrives, well, I haven't had a drive from a Dell server fail on me in over two years (over a dozen servers of various size); had bad RAM shipped twice in that time, but the instability was picked up right away and threw an error on the LCD diagnostics. Had a bad PSU once that I can remember, but that server closet room was an embarrassment with faulty grounds and old dead UPSes.

Having said that, I have many many old servers (Pentium II/III vintage) with SCSI drives that still POST and run Windows 2000/Linux stable.

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Thanks gravyface for sharing your experience. – alfish Apr 20 '11 at 1:44
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We have a client with 3 R200's currently in use. Roughly 3 years old next month. None of them have had any hardware issues (drives, mobo, power, etc.).

We support a variety (20 or so) of other Dell rackmount servers purchased around that time. I recall 1 having a hard drive failure and 1 with a power supply failure. Overall very low hardware failure rates.

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well 3 years is still under warranty. My impression is that 4-5 years of healthy life is quite normal for a server of brand. Isn't it? – alfish Apr 20 '11 at 10:02
Yes, and we end up extending the replacement warranty for year 4 and 5 more often than not. – gravyface Apr 20 '11 at 12:43
@alfish - Yes, if there's no need to upgrade the hardware (for architecture or performance reasons) we usually extend it to 4 or 5 years. 5 years is my max though. I know Dell will extend some hardware warranties to a 6th year, but I don't let my clients do that. A lot changes in 5 years in the technology world. – user78940 Apr 20 '11 at 15:22
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