Comment by methou

My told a story that when they were college students and broke, they just went to a scrape yard for car parts. Today me and my homelab friends just scraping ebay and local industrial waste sites to get routers, switches, and server parts. We had a good luck with LTO-5 and LTO-6 tapes and tape libraries, also for NICs it's pretty easy to get connect-x 5 and 6 at an acceptable price, CPU/MEM are ok, motherboards are difficult. You just set a spec, buy whatever is available atm, then wait until you can get a whole server. It's often a long process, and itself can become a hobby. (took me 3mo, my friend 2 years to get an "ideal" server)

Well, pricing out is real, even the junk parts are now at least 20% pricier than pre-covid, and I really hated myself for not bidding for SN2010M at $700 ~ $1500 range. Those are beautiful beasts.