Just wondering as computers are sorta my hobby and i like messing around with different ones. I havent in a while due to prices going up such as with ram usually. I dont mess with new tech, but i want to know what you guys do with the crazy prices out there? or are you already set before prices went up? Or are you just lucky in some form?

Just curious.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 13 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 child)

I scavenge old hardware from work. My rack is now complete (hardware wise, at least), as I powered up the JBOD cabinet today, consisting of a bunch of harddrives left over from disk upgrades at work. It's a bunch of 10TB and 3TB SAS drive. That server used to be an automation controller, now it's my storage server. I had 160G of DDR3 RAM laying around from a machine I retired a while back, which is nice to have with ZFS.

My VPN concentrator was a datalogger for two industry robots.

My web crawler was supposed to be a test-server for the software department, but they needed to upgrade.

The only new hardware is my game server, and RAM was over half the price. It's a fairly standard AMD build, except I gave it a rackmount case.

My networking hardware is also from work, as I detest consumer grade networking hardware. I replaced my shitbox ISP router with a Fortigate 101E, for example.

EDIT: Oh, and the UPS was bought dirt cheap at a bankruptcy auction (coincidentally, the bankrupt entity was a competitor of my employer).

The rack itself was given away at a regional airport who was getting rid of some old and unused stuff. It's soundproofed and costs a fortune new. By far my luckiest score.

  • source
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • It's not worth the downsides, but a major upside of working for a large tech outlet is getting to pick over the massive amount of tech refuse they cycle through. Being able to snag 2-3 year old pro equipment for free is an undeniably tempting perk.

  • source
  • parent