[weblacky]

I've always been told anecdotally that the Cherokees were better power supplies, though I have absolutely no data back that up. Obviously being more watts = better :-)

If I were working on these power supplies I would also target Cherokee first because it's the higher end of the two options for octane and is compatible with every octane. Hence it will have the highest demand among the two. It would also stand a reason that people would expect the lucent power supply to be cheaper because it's a lesser rated unit. In repair this would be a problem as it is not a realistic expectation given that the effort in both is similar.

While it might seem obvious on the surface, there's a bit of a nuanced problem when it comes to SGI repair at the current moment. There may be demand but the price structure may not support doing the work. Now obviously they're always outliers, there are always a few people that are willing to spend the cash to get what they want, to have what they want, so that things just work. But for the vast majority of customers that's not the case.

The problem you run into, is the "starving SGI collector" routine. This happens much less than it used to, but 15+ years ago it was very common to pick up an SGI station for a few hundred bucks, fully working at the time right off of being decommissioned by some aerospace company or some video production house. You would then pay $45 for a massive 36GB SCA 80 SCSI hard drive and boot it up and play all day long.

So many people, that have had SGI collections for 20+ years, know that SGI's were expensive retail but have no concept of how expensive they really were. They picked them up from a pallet for maybe $200 to $300. If you ask them to spend $500 on a rebuilt power supply what do you think their reaction would be? "That's over twice when I paid for the system!" Even if you take in the fact that inflation makes that a pretty good deal, it's still a number that drives people away.

Now times have changed, there's no denying that, in the past 10 years you've seen prices rise dramatically and inventory fall dramatically. As new collectors come into the hobby there's also those that have never had the opportunity and now are paying higher prices to enter the hobby. I'm sure this is really true of any collecting hobby, it's not unique to vintage computers. But just like any vintage appliance, age is a form of wear and tear and at the end of the day parts need to be replaced if you want the item to keep working.

Right now repair/rebuilt parts directly compete with the used part market, assuming you can get the part you want on the used market. Some parts are now so rare that there is no used market available for them. You would think that some of this isn't quite apples to apples. Are you really going to compare a nearly 30 year-old power supply to one that has been gone through and refurbished with new consumables?

Well a lot of people would equate them to being equal. Because at the end of the day to most people a power supply is binary, it either works or it doesn't. Very few people understand that there's an in-between phase where you're doing damage to your computer that a new power supply is not going to magically solve. An old but functional power supply can feed bad power and cause damage to a circuit before the power supply itself engages its own protection circuitry or simply outright fails. And at that point now it's done additional damage that has to be addressed.

Right now I'm placing my focus on parts for which there is no used market supply for, without getting in the detail there is a high scarcity of the last and highest spec-d parts for the chimera family that's even still used in some places. I can't go into detail of who uses them because that's kept close to the vest by clients I've interacted with. Suffice to say that people who still use these for business produce a shadow industry that has drained the used and dealer inventory of a lot of the Chimera parts (e.g. V12 Graphics cards and Video import cards, DCD, Quad CPU boards, 1Ghz CPUs, etc...). The reason you don't see these parts is they've been consumed by entities that still run these systems. Systems like octane and older have a different issue.

But as long as there's a fairly brisk trade online in used SGI parts, the used market tends to set the value. Often times refurbishment work is going to have a higher cost than a used, but functional, part. There will come a time when there will be such scarcity that repair will be the only option and hopefully people will not have thrown away they're broken parts so we have something to repair.

But right now if you were to make a business around repair the only entities that are going to pay you money are those that have active demand for the chimera parts. I'm sure they'll be people interested in the older parts as well but there's usually not enough to keep the lights on if you're actually running a business. To some effect I'm going to try to balance the two, but right now business users take priority because they pay the bills. So their concerns are being addressed first.

It's my sincere hope that in the next couple years that business needs will be then me and attention can be returned to the older SGI hardware that will allow at least the option of buying repaired parts where none currently exists. But even at that time, be prepared for retail pricing because at the end of the day that's what needs to happen.