Comment by zppln
4 months ago
I'm a little bit curious about this. Where do all the hardware from the big tech giants usually go once they've upgraded?
4 months ago
I'm a little bit curious about this. Where do all the hardware from the big tech giants usually go once they've upgraded?
In-house hyperscaler stuff gets shredded, after every single piece of flash storage gets first drilled through and every hard drive gets bent by a hydraulic press. Then it goes into the usual e-waste recycling stream (ie. gets sent to poor countries where precious metals get extracted by people with a halved life expectancy).
Off-the-shelf enterprise gear has a chance to get a second life through remarketing channels, but much of it also gets shredded due to dumb corporate policies. There are stories of some companies refusing to offload a massive decom onto the second hand market as it would actually cause a crash. :)
It's a very efficient system, you see.
Similar to corporate laptops where due to stupid policies, for most BigCos you can't really buy or otherwise get a used laptop, even as the former corporate used of said laptop.
Super environmentally friendly.
I used (relatively) ancient servers (5-10 years in age) because their performance is completely adequate; they just use slightly more power. As a plus it's easy to buy spare parts, and they run on DDR3, so I'm not paying the current "RAM tax". I generally get such a server, max out its RAM, max out its CPUs and put it to work.
Same, the bang for buck on a 5yo server is insane. I got an old Dell a year ago (to replace our 15yo one that finally died) and it was $1200 AUD for a maxed out recently-retired server with 72TB of hard drives and something like 292GB of RAM.
Just not too old. Easy to get into "power usage makes it not worth it" for any use case when it runs 24/7
8 replies →
Some is sold on the used market; some is destroyed. There are plenty of used V100 and A100 available now for example.