price per server?

I've seen a few threads here discussing a good purchase price for a typical desktop tower. The consensus seems to be around $5.

What about servers? I guess servers come in various shapes and sizes but it seems that you can roughly classify them into
1. Smaller "tower" servers that are essentially large desktops
2. Newer rack servers
3. Older servers that look like metal boxes on wheels.

This is based on what I've seen so far so it's entirely possible that there are other common types. In any case, assuming they are mostly intact, i.e. they have their main boards, processors, power supplies, RAM, fans, but no harddrives, how much would you pay for those?



thx

Yea. Assigning a price for them is difficult unless you have been into one and then again it could be totally different on the inside. I base what I pay off of the size and also if it is included in a lot I try to adjust my pricing on the whole lot to account for the unknown value of the server.

Originally Posted by BRASSCATCHER

What are you looking to do with it.

I just got about a dozen servers, together with some laptops and desktops, for free from a small IT firm that was moving into a new office. Up until now, I've always taken apart all the hardware I got and then sold the boards etc to an out of state buyer. Now I am extremely busy with my day job, kids' activities etc etc. So I am considering selling the whole stash to another local escrap guy. I've never sold whole computers for scrap like that so I am trying to determine a good price without having to open up each box and catalog what's in it. Also, even though the guy who gave me all the hardware told me that one or two servers might be new enough to be sold as working units, i don't think I want to invest the time to research, post, etc. So I am looking at the whole pile as simply scrap and want to figure out if it's better to take apart myself or sell whole.

I happen to love servers. I'd haul them all day, every day for the goodies that are inside them! A little research will quickly tell you whether you have something you can re-market, or something to scrap out. After a while you will have a very good base of knowledge for any future server finds; it just takes a little time.

I would pay $10 for a loaded full tower sized server. I just parted one out and it yielded alot more that a typical desktop. More ram, more cards, larger motherboard, larger power supplies, more hard drives and dual cpus with copper heatsinks. All around it was the same yield or better than 2 desktops and had the same teardown time involved or less involved due to most of the parts being hot swap.

Originally Posted by BRASSCATCHER

If you never opened up server equiptment I recommend you sell the laptops and desk tops and keep the servers. Even if you only do one every other day I think you will be happy with what comes out of them.

I tore down quite a few of them, but never recorded how much stuff I got from them to figure out how much each server was worth. So I was hoping to cheat a little and see if the more experienced members of this forum already did this

If I am patient enough, I might do it with this stash and then report my findings here...

The one i mentioned above yielded $40 plus in scrap. The motherboard alone is 6 pounds at $4 per pound. Then the 12 sticks of silver ram for another $8. And so on. Got 1+ pound of number 1 copper from the 2 heatsinks.

Servers are a lot more varied than the desktops. I scrapped quite a few of them, and generally I like them. I advertise as paying $5-25 each depending on size and how complete. For a tower type sever I pay $5-10 each, for a smaller rack mount unit (1U-2U) I pay $7.50-15 each, and pay more for the bigger ones. I just picked up 18 large servers yesterday, each one weight about 80 pounds or so. Paid $25 each, was a little more then I planned to pay, but they are all complete, have 2 to 8 CPU's in each, etc, I should do OK with them.

Originally Posted by aurum

(1U-2U)

What's "1U-2U"?