I find a lot of 10 year old Dell PowerEdge servers for basically free these days, some loaded with 128gb+ RAM. They work perfectly well with TrueNAS, pfSense, or even more powerful stuff. If you dont need a thousand cores, I always suggest them to people. Otherwise they end up in the dump..

I have a rack in a datacenter with mostly 5 year old Supermicro servers. We bought them all off of Ebay for no more than $400 each. They work great and we have more compute and bandwidth for our workloads for less than $1000 a month. If we used one of the could providers it would be many thousands of dollars per month. I understand not everyone has the skills to run their own rack but the value of doing so is totally worth it.

The one downside I've found (other than noise) running a super old supermicro at home is the power consumption is nowhere near as good as the modern hardware. But my server is _really_ old, some dual socket xeon thing I got super cheap.

I was hoping this would be an effort to re-use components that don't change as much between generations - such as power supplies or VRM components.

> The reused components are 4th and 5th generation RAM modules, as well as solid state drives

Reusing memory sticks is worth a paper about green IT now? Sigh. I was hoping for a bit more...

(Come on, at least reuse PSUs and disk backplanes/caddies as well...)