Comment by TacticalCoder
10 hours ago
Yeah but TBH an old server with DDR3 ECC is still way sufficient to serve something like 99.9% of all the servers out there's jobs.
That's the plain truth: most sites/servers simply serve very very very little and have not anywhere near the need for 256 GB of RAM, let alone 512 GB.
These old servers aren't sufficient for the Amazon/Apple/Microsoft/Meta/Google/Oracle of this world, but for 99.9% of the rest of the world, they're more than plenty.
And the world and technology shall keep on marching: we'll have DDR6 and as soon as that happens, suddenly all the hyperscalers shall consider DDR5 to be oh-so-lame and dumped by the truckloads in landfills.
We may have two more painful years ahead for RAM but we'll then have plenty of used enterprise/datacenters gear on the market.
Depending on your location and power costs though, before the recent crises, it was probably generally worth it get newer hardware for the power efficiency gains. I have an old DDR3 dual-socket XEON E5-2650 system, and while it's more than sufficient for everything I run on it (and then some), its idle power consumption is pretty bad. If prices do ever come down, I'll probably try to replace it purely for that reason, even though I'm not sure I'll ever need more raw horsepower than it's got.