Someone just moving decommissioned servers from a data center to new users without doing anything with the equipment in between allows you to find decent deals if you're looking for something to put in a rack.
Be aware that rack servers are usually rather power hungry, so they might be expensive to run over time.
I have the app installed and the shipping costs to Eastern Europe where I live often surpass 50% of the price of the tech itself.
I'd love to reuse. A lot of us out there who are still oldschool-ish and can work miracles with older tech. But I am not about to spend the same money I'd spend on simply building a PC with EATX case and the ability to shove 12 HDDs in there. I'd still end up spending more on the local market, mind you, but we're looking at 10-15% maximum and I don't find that a worthy difference to wait 3 weeks for an older server, especially with a very high likelihood of also having to pay 20% of the value of it to customs.
Whether it's worth it will depend on what you're looking for.
I expect there would be more of a glut of this stuff where there were lots of server farms and web tech businesses. If the scale was much smaller in your area compared to the US, then of course less servers are discarded.
Isn't there a second hand market for enterprises?
Still not at all important for me, not until I move in in my own place which is due in 2-3 years. But after that happens I'll definitely want a few servers in a closet.
On Dells this can be done in the BIOS.
It runs a dozen VMs and sits almost idle most of the time unless I'm experimenting with CPU LLMs. My one quibble is that it's small form factor and has limited PCIe lanes so installing a GPU is complicated.
The whole setup including the M80S, the disk shelf, an old Brocade network switch, a Unifi NVR, and 12 spinning rust disks uses about 200W total, which is about $30/month in electricity.
I personally moved about 10 years ago to a very simple setup using a intel nuc. The idle is in the 5-10w range and max 45-65. I was using something that was idle 100-200. It shaved off about 15-30 bucks off my power bill per month when I did it plus a couple of other items in the house that had very poor idle. I am planning to move back to something a bit more interesting. But the specs to keep an eye on is the idle and max draw. For me I want something modest. But if you go all out and drop a couple 4090s in there and a decent xeon or threadripper it can get up there. Also keep in mind some of them have extra interesting things like fiber channel cards or some sort of infrastructure fabric ports (or lots of sata). They are not 0 but do add into the cost. So you may want to look how to disable them if you are not using them.
So something that is ide 5w would be about 5 dollars per year idle and about 65 form my max load. My price per kwh is 11 cents. Pretty sure the formula is ((number of watts)/1000)24365*(price per kwh). That should get you the yearly cost. Just run the calc for max and min load.
So you may be better served buying something newer that uses less power in the long run. Short term though playing with old hardware can be cost effective and fun.
https://www.film-rezensionen.de/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/2...
As one myself I possess pallets of nearly new equipment that had zero issues in function and was only decommissioned per security compliance requirements involving End Of Life equipment. Many informed consumers are now complaining about the forced hardware upgrade for Windows 11 but this EOL revenue technique has existed for decades given Payment Card Industry (P.C.I.) compliance.
I have a poweredge from 2015 or so. Dual Xeon processors and all. It tops out at 500W absolute max. Though, idle is at least 75-100W. It's not too bad, I think I calculated <$100 a year. Obviously you can get some amount of virtual server for that much money, but I like being able to lay hands on a physical box. Plus the blinkenlights and HDD chatter noises are nice.
