Kimsufi is an affiliated company with one of the biggest providers in France — OVH. A couple of months ago, all of Kimsufi’s services are migrated to OVH and everything is now OVH’s.
For 4.99€ (before tax, more on that later), you will get the following spec.
Intel ATOM N2800 @ 1.86 GHz - 2 Cores / 4 Threads; 4 GB DDR3 1066 MHz; 1 x 1 TB SATA HDD*; Symmetric & Dedicated 100 Mbps Internet Connection.
The hard disk they are marketing is 1 TB, but actually, it is 2 TB. The logic of their spec sheet is absolutely CHAOS. When you install the OS, it will say it is 2 TB, but marketing says that it is 1 TB. So…
Bullshit aside, let’s look at the benchmark.
Bench.sh here.
I didn’t expect that the speed to China would be that amazing. It fully utilizes the 100 Mbps Internet connection. (Oh, did I mention that the bandwidth is not capped?)
However, the CPU sucks. According to Intel ARK, it is discontinued.
Geekbench 5: Single-Core: 109, Multi-Core: 293. https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/18605000
Like what would you want for just 5 euros a month, considering the electric fee spike in Europe currently?
Because this is a dedicated server, the health of the hard disk matters a lot. Unfortunately, this drive is kinda old. (Drives in the data center GRA1 are always old, my friend says)
Smartmontools is a great tool to check your S.M.A.R.T. info, so I’m going to check it. Here’s a part of the output.
=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION === Model Family: Hitachi/HGST Ultrastar 7K4000 Device Model: HGST HUS724020ALA640 Serial Number: PN************ LU WWN Device Id: 5 000cca 22d***** Firmware Version: MF6OABY0 User Capacity: 2,000,398,934,016 bytes [2.00 TB] Sector Size: 512 bytes logical/physical Rotation Rate: 7200 rpm Form Factor: 3.5 inches Device is: In smartctl database [for details use: -P show] ATA Version is: ATA8-ACS T13/1699-D revision 4 SATA Version is: SATA 3.0, 6.0 Gb/s (current: 3.0 Gb/s) Local Time is: Sun Nov 13 06:37:55 2022 UTC SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability. SMART support is: Enabled ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE 1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x000b 100 100 016 Pre-fail Always - 0 2 Throughput_Performance 0x0005 136 136 054 Pre-fail Offline - 80 3 Spin_Up_Time 0x0007 100 100 024 Pre-fail Always - 401 4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0012 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 41 5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 100 100 005 Pre-fail Always - 0 7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x000b 100 100 067 Pre-fail Always - 0 8 Seek_Time_Performance 0x0005 145 145 020 Pre-fail Offline - 24 9 Power_On_Hours 0x0012 090 090 000 Old_age Always - 71467 10 Spin_Retry_Count 0x0013 100 100 060 Pre-fail Always - 0 12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 41 192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032 098 098 000 Old_age Always - 2733 193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0012 098 098 000 Old_age Always - 2733 194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0002 193 193 000 Old_age Always - 31 (Min/Max 25/53) 196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0 197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0022 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0 198 Offline_Uncorrectable 0x0008 100 100 000 Old_age Offline - 0 199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count 0x000a 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1 Num Test_Description Status Remaining LifeTime(hours) LBA_of_first_error # 1 Short offline Completed without error 00% 2214 - # 2 Short offline Completed without error 00% 2206 - # 3 Short offline Completed without error 00% 2206 -
To tell you the truth, I’m in bad luck. This drive is over 70 thousand hours online, so backup your data frequently to the cloud. The 500 GB free backup storage is not included in this KS-1 machine. But the drive will be replaced if it dies.
Drive speed test.
$ sudo hdparm -Tt /dev/sda /dev/sda: Timing cached reads: 1736 MB in 2.00 seconds = 868.02 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 478 MB in 3.00 seconds = 159.22 MB/sec $ dd if=/dev/zero of=1GB.test bs=1M count=1024 1024+0 records in 1024+0 records out 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB, 1.0 GiB) copied, 10.5624 s, 102 MB/s
It’s not terribly bad considering that this is just an HDD.
Conclusion
Should you buy it then? Sure, as long as it is in stock. It is out of stock most of the time. And it costs either 4.99 EUR or 5.99 USD before tax. The tax problem is serious because that’s a whopping 23% VAT.
You can bypass that tax if you submit your real-name ID/passport/driver’s license etc. But they don’t accept business from China so… To be clear, if you choose the USD currency then it’s always 0% VAT.
Overall, it is a great server for backup and a seedbox. It’s in Europe so.DMCA is not a thing there, buy it if you need that.