Drove 3 hours to a salvage yard in Ohio and found a goldmine of old IBM servers

Last weekend I took a trip down to this salvage yard near Columbus that supposedly had some enterprise gear. I was expecting maybe a few old Dell towers but they had a whole warehouse section with racks and racks of old server hardware. Stumbled on three IBM x3850 X5 units that were still fully assembled with memory and processors. The guy running the place said they came from a bank that upgraded and he just wanted them gone. I ended up hauling two of them out for like $80 each after some haggling. Got them home and one booted right up on the first try which felt like winning the lottery. Has anyone else found good deals at random salvage yards or is this just a one time luck thing?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_alice11d ago

Pulled a similar score last year at a scrap yard in Indiana. They had a pallet of HP DL380 G7s sitting out in the rain and the guy gave me four of them for fifty bucks because nobody wanted to haul them off. Two of them had dust bunnies the size of my fist inside but they still booted up after I blew them out with compressed air. Crazy what companies just toss out like yesterday's trash.

cora5189d ago

Friend of mine found a similar deal at a scrapyard outside Cleveland last spring. They had a whole stack of Dell R710s that got rained on, but he pulled six of them for forty bucks. @the_alice you are totally right about companies just tossing stuff, its like they have no idea what still works if it gets a little wet. He dried them out in his garage for a week plugged one in and it ran just fine, minus a few drive errors. Makes you wonder how much good hardware gets wasted every day just because it sat in a puddle.

the_thea11d ago

Wow, I used to think salvage yard finds were just overhyped, but this is seriously making me reconsider!