What to do with old IT junk

I have a storage room full of about 20+ old Optiplexes, a couple old rack servers, tons of 512MB, 1GB, 2GB, 4GB DDR3 of various brands, old ATX and server PSUs, tons of old SCSI and SATA drives, and god knows what else. I have some old Cisco fast Ethernet routing equipment that weigh as much as a Honda Civic. Will post some pics when I get time. I need to start getting rid of shit and I’d hate to just throw all of this stuff away. If not as functional items, does any of this shit have any kind of value? Should I just recycle it?

I have a storage room full of about 20+ old Optiplexes, a couple old rack servers, tons of 512MB, 1GB, 2GB, 4GB DDR3 of various brands, old ATX and server PSUs, tons of old SCSI and SATA drives, and god knows what else. I have some old Cisco fast Ethernet routing equipment that weigh as much as a Honda Civic. Will post some pics when I get time. I need to start getting rid of shit and I’d hate to just throw all of this stuff away. If not as functional items, does any of this shit have any kind of value? Should I just recycle it?

I will try to go in order.
-The racks can probably be reused either by yourself or someone you know; if not, resell them.

-Depending on the type of DDR3 (ECC, Registered, etc.), you can reuse it to put together a shit ton of used Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge, and Haswell builds, and sell the rest accordingly.

-If the power supplies are as old as they sound (6+ years in server conditions), just junk them all.

-If the hard drives are working and without SMART errors, you could reuse them for your own storage needs. However, be careful as they are old and were previously in servers, so they probably wouldn’t last as long compared to a new drive. Whatever the case, use at your own risk.

-I cannot comment on the CIsco equipment unless you put up pictures.

As mentioned, some of the stuff may or may not be useful anymore, so it might not be worthwhile to ship some items, especially ones that are large and heavy with little use left to them. As far as power supplies, I’ve had good luck with power supplies lasting a long time, but the number one cause of power supply failure is shipping. If you do sell or give away any, be certain to warn people of this so they don’t get upset over a power supply that has gone bad.

As far as non-functioning value, I’d imagine most of it isn’t that valuable. Many of the really rare things with significant value drop off fast if it no longer functions. Many things do have rare earth elements, but they are so small and difficult to separate that the scrap value isn’t going to make anyone rich very easily. Recycling things no one wants sounds like a good idea.

The only thing I can think of that might have value added beyond scrap are certain cases to devices. I know lots of people like to use random old cases to things to stuff Raspberry Pi’s or mini ITX builds inside, so things that might fit that use could be valuable to somebody.

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Okay. I’ll see if I can post some pics in that thread and let you guys dig through it for a couple weeks. Then I’ll haul it to a scrapyard, might as well if I’m going to have to bring it to a dump anyway. It’s at least 1000 pounds of metal.

When you do get around to posting nudes of your sweet, sweet hardware, you might mention what state you are in, just in case someone might fine a new home for some of it?

Please note that if you’re going to junk it, take it to an e-waste event or something like that, don’t just throw it in a dumpster. #treehugger

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Yeah I was going to see if I could take it to a metal scrapyard or a place that does that, but idk if there is one in town. I thought about refurbishing the PCs but it prolly isn’t worthy my time.

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The reason I say that is there are lots of companies that dissolve the components and separate out the different materials, which I think is really cool.

I am located in Louisiana. And yeah, the workstations are all shit really, best systems are Core 2 Duos. Old junk.

img_2215 looks like an ATX form-factor. that might still be useful.

also, nice rack. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

The rack is probably the best thing out of all this. Also forgot to take a pic but I have a stack of different server rails, mostly Dell I assume.

The big HP printer still works with some fiddling, surprisingly

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DELL RAILS?

YES DO WANT!

where abouts are you? I probably shouldn’t, but I want that rack.

Baton Rouge

oof. I’m in San Diego. Definitely not going to be cost effective to ship that rack. :frowning:

Maybe rails though. If you have any that fit on an R510, I’d definitely take them.

How do I tell?

I’ll gladly take one or two complete machines that can run x86-64 Fedora :smiley: mainly I want to be able to ssh into some machines to play around

Good question. I’ll have to figure this out.

R510’s take model D20YT. They look and cost something like this:

If I had the money to ship that rack… That said everyone could always use some old Dell PowerEdge’s for… things.

Frankly, I don’t think you’d want a 2950. They’re the epitome of “Hot and Loud”

If you want an old cheap server, look at the R310 or R510. They’re cheap and solid systems that aren’t too bad on the power bill.

Or talk to @FaunCB, who’s got a couple R610’s for sale last I checked.

The R610’s have sold for 300 and a high cal Mac Pro. BUT there are R710’s for 100 bucks on local craigslist.