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A lot of them get bought by liquidators who clean them up and list them on ebay. Search for "server" and you'll find lots of listings like "Supermicro 1U-Intel

by dpe82 8y ago

A lot of them get bought by liquidators who clean them up and list them on ebay. Search for "server" and you'll find lots of listings like "Supermicro 1U-Intel Quad Core 2.5GHz, 4GB DDR2 RAM, 2x160GB" where there are hundreds of a given configuration available.

leetbulb 8y ago
I once purchased a lot of 20x dual-Xeon (1st gen) DELL servers from a liquidator on eBay. They were extremely cheap. The seller personally delivered them in a van on a four hour drive because that's what made financial sense due to the shipping weight. They were fun to play around with and it was definitely an experience. However, having them around became old quickly and flipping them was much more difficult than I had originally thought. Luckily I ended up breaking even, even after personally delivering a few of them several hours away.
- KhalPanda 8y ago
  > The seller personally delivered them in a van on a four hour drive > ... after personally delivering a few of them several hours away. Heh, and the cycle continues.
- jason_slack 8y ago
  Wow, this same thing happened to me. I bought some 1U Sun machines on eBay and the Seller was going to be around my area (3 hours away) because his wife was attending a seminar. He personally delivered them to me and had several hours to kill so he helped me rack several of them and we went for some lunch. Interesting enough, he had these servers to run his "craft pencil" business where him and his wife made fancy pencils and sold them. I'm not sure why he needed more than 1 server to handle this (and Sun no less)(or even shared hosting) but I got a great deal.
- joezydeco 8y ago
  I had a SuperMicro 1U in my home for a little while when doing a project. Holy crap the fans on that thing were deafening. I suppose there's no need to spend money on quiet cooling when they're going to be loaded into a warehouse of racks. I had to move it to the basement where I could still hear it at night.
gtsteve 8y ago
> 2x160GB Probably it was stock that never got used in that case. You'd never find liquidated servers with hard disks normally. Disks are normally destroyed mechanically. About 10 years back I worked for a company that had this mechanical press that would gouge a large hole in the hard disk, shattering the platters but with SSDs I think industrial shredders are more likely. It's probably very wasteful but better than leaking data I guess.
- dpe82 8y ago
  Not everyone follows best practices.

by dpe82 8y ago

leetbulb 8y ago

I once purchased a lot of 20x dual-Xeon (1st gen) DELL servers from a liquidator on eBay. They were extremely cheap. The seller personally delivered them in a van on a four hour drive because that's what made financial sense due to the shipping weight. They were fun to play around with and it was definitely an experience. However, having them around became old quickly and flipping them was much more difficult than I had originally thought. Luckily I ended up breaking even, even after personally delivering a few of them several hours away.

KhalPanda 8y ago
> The seller personally delivered them in a van on a four hour drive > ... after personally delivering a few of them several hours away. Heh, and the cycle continues.
jason_slack 8y ago
Wow, this same thing happened to me. I bought some 1U Sun machines on eBay and the Seller was going to be around my area (3 hours away) because his wife was attending a seminar. He personally delivered them to me and had several hours to kill so he helped me rack several of them and we went for some lunch. Interesting enough, he had these servers to run his "craft pencil" business where him and his wife made fancy pencils and sold them. I'm not sure why he needed more than 1 server to handle this (and Sun no less)(or even shared hosting) but I got a great deal.
joezydeco 8y ago
I had a SuperMicro 1U in my home for a little while when doing a project. Holy crap the fans on that thing were deafening. I suppose there's no need to spend money on quiet cooling when they're going to be loaded into a warehouse of racks. I had to move it to the basement where I could still hear it at night.

gtsteve 8y ago

> 2x160GB Probably it was stock that never got used in that case. You'd never find liquidated servers with hard disks normally. Disks are normally destroyed mechanically. About 10 years back I worked for a company that had this mechanical press that would gouge a large hole in the hard disk, shattering the platters but with SSDs I think industrial shredders are more likely. It's probably very wasteful but better than leaking data I guess.

dpe82 8y ago
Not everyone follows best practices.