Anyone have a go to for retired server and rack gear for sale aside from ebay?
Sometimes you can find stuff on CW/CDW-Direct.
Otherwise, look at your local business supply surplus store or your local federal government DRMO facility.
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Check with an electronic recycling center if you’re in a large metropolitan area
Also major university and city government usually have surplus equipment sales, sometimes all the time, sometimes once a year
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https://www.theserverstore.com/
Got two 4U cases from them, one barebones and another with an old Xeon I turn on for backups. Was very well packed.
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eBay is a good place to start. Instead of just buying equipment you find there, look at seller names, and head over to their own websites. You’ll quickly build up a list.
EDIT: To avoid the noise of every homelab’er selling their old rackmount server, limit your searches to minimum quantities of something like 5+.
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I like this place. for less than the price of a chenbro I found a used supermicro with motherboard that I can turn around and sell. Going to check this place every couple days.
Thanks, good call
Yeah, they’ve been around for a while, and are highly regarded among fellow home enthusiasts who happen to need cases that have a shit ton of hard drive slots for… reasons.
One note, if you get a case with a backplane, triple check that it’s SAS2. If the part number doesn’t have SAS2 or SAS3 in it, that’s a big clue. SAS version 1 backplanes can have weird behavior such as not supporting any hard drives over 2TB, or suddenly not supporting over 2TB if a certain amount of bays are filled. Basically it sucks and should be avoided and stick with SAS2 (common, affordable) or SAS3 (price skyrockets)
Some other notes on old hardware:
In additions to old xeons turning electricity into heat with high efficiency, also be aware that the IPMI on old boards will work, but were mostly the worst kind of “enterprise” grade hacks and really kinda suck if you want to make extensive use of them. For example my supermicro x9dri-f has the option to mount an iso as a cd drive, however this requires a highly specific and pain in the ass setup to share it from your current computer. Also seems to work better with specific versions of Oracle’s java. Better off making a dedicated PXE boot server. Good enough for a backup though.
Also be aware with this type of equipment the fans are loud. The manifold wall fans are loud, the exhaust fans are loud… hell even when the unit is off, the PSU fans are clearly audible. Unless you plan on modding, it belongs in the garage.
Also, do have some spare SAS/SATA cable of whatever type you plan to use. Bad connections and bad cables are the number one source of errors, followed by overheating HBA’s.
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I know you said besides ebay. But something I have had success with is contacting the sellers through eBay and tell them exactly what you want and negotiate the price. They can then make you a private buy link.
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They’ll customize orders for you (including cpu swap) if they’re not too busy. They have made some mistakes before but always made it right for me.
If you see one of their listings on eBay, they’ll usually give you a discount if you reach out directly.
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What are you looking for. A few years ago I was the CTO of a san fran dot com company and after we sold i needed to off load about 60 servers, SANs, switches, mostly DELL PowerEdge 8xx,9xx,7xx series and EqualLogic SAN the PS6100X series and a bunch of other gear I couldn’t offload. So let me know and maybe we can work something out.
Found them through Ebay as well and bought directly. It was a good experience.
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