UNIXSurplus Reviews 58

Purchased an 8TB internal hard drive but it was faulty when it arrived. I was able to get the drive to power up but could not get it recognized in BIOS despite my best attempts. Now its an expensive paperweight.

Item arrived promptly; excellent protective packaging and in good shipping container. Motherboard in excellent condition and appears new.
Pre-shipment call and email to verify destination address was a good idea.
Had a problem due to a faulty memory module but Nick mailed out a replacement. Everything satisfactory now.

In testing the X9SRL-F, I thought the motherboard had bad PCIe slots. Unfortunately, I was not able to test every slot until after the 30 day return period.

Still, I opened an RMA to see what could be done. There was no response, not even to say that the 30-day period had passed. This was caused by a misconfiguration of their website that sent the RMA request to the wrong place. For this, they get dinged one star.

But, the motherboard was actually functional, which I determined after I got another X9SRL-F that showed the same symptoms. It turns out there is a very subtle bug which is only exposed if you:
1. Have more than 2 PCIe cards installed.
2. At least one of the PCIe cards is fairly modern (like an NVMe adapter) compared to the motherboard.
3. Got unlucky with the reset of the CMOS.

#3 is the key, where if you clear the CMOS, the default for Active State Power Management (ASPM) is "Disabled", but sometimes it doesn't quite take, and it is enabled, even though it shows as not. With ASPM enabled, the other two parts of the bug work together to make the motherboard extremely unreliable, and the slots farthest from the power supply (the x4 slots) are the most affected.

The workaround for the bug is to enable ASPM, save and reset, then manually disable it and save and reset, which causes the setting to correctly disabled. I don't fault UNIXSurplus for not hitting this extremely rare bug when they test, plus it still doesn't mean the motherboard is truly bad.

Excellent communication, very fast time to ship after order, surprisingly good packaging of the products in general

These guys are the best surplus outfit in the US.

Perhaps my favorite server supplier! Lots of great deals and they work so well with us! Always happy when boxes come from UnixSurplus!

They didn't have the items we paid for in stock, but called us to get approval to provide another of a different brand. This process took several days and then the item was shipped. This process took far longer than expected. Therefore, minus one star for time of purchase to actually receiving the item being several days longer than expected. However, once the hardware was installed, it worked perfectly. Overall, happy with the product received and would buy from them again, provided we didn't the need something asap.

Shipping took forever and I assume it's because they were testing.

Parts missing from product even though they have them in stock.

Parts damaged, probably during shipping but that reflects on their packaging.

Product didn't seem like it was tested much other than power on though, check the product review.

Great customer service by Nick, as usual. He is really an asset to UNIXSurplus.

I've had many transactions with UNIXSurplus, both direct and through eBay, for complete servers as well as components. John, Tay, and especially Justin have all provided excellent customer service and I have been happy with all equipment received. Everything I have ordered was ACTUALLY ready-for-reuse and was clearly tested prior to shipping. The pricing tends to be reasonable and competitive, and shipping might cost extra, but all equipment I bought was packed VERY well and actually shipping time was minimal.

I have used this store for a long time, and I love it!

I love Unix Surplus.

They provide personal service, and professional expertise.

I’ve ordered multiple systems from them, and they make sure each system is configed correctly, POSTS and boots.

IMHO their systems are BETTER than new, because they only sell the surviving used systems ( new too). These used systems have been worm in, and never break for me.

Thank you Unix Surplus, I will always come to you for my business!

Part worked perfectly and they quickly handled any issues I had.

Good products, great price.

I’ve used UnixSurplus for a variety of purchases. Most notably the r720xd which I still use in my homelab. It was a first time enterprise hardware purchase and they provided technical services alongside the purchase of the machine which included flashing the HBA for ZFS and providing ease of mind with the purchase by verifying my target platform FreeNAS would function. Since then I’ve bought a variety of products such as RAM and NICs. At the time I wasn’t as well versed in the hardware and ecosystems, and they certainly provided the expertise to help with that. The packing was excellent and ensured a safe and secure delivery.

I keep coming back because prices are reasonable for their equipment.

Mostly, the description of the product is accurate. However, one time I received a server that had a HBA card with a bad port. They made it right by sending out a replacement card.

Also, they gave me a system with the correct amount of RAM. But when I tried to add more RAM sticks to it, it didn't work because one of the motherboard slots was dead. It ended up being ok because I put the new DIMMs in a non-standard slot, which worked. But just know that what the equipment is rated for in the posting may be its limit. Upgrading beyond that is not supported and the company will not automatically provide the results of their own internal test reports.