Dumped as garbage? Shipped to poor countries? Recycled? Sold? (Like we could buy custom servers like Google or facebook have). Just curious :)
They were fun to play around with and it was definitely an experience. However, having them around became old quickly and flipping them was much more difficult than I had originally thought. Luckily I ended up breaking even, even after personally delivering a few of them several hours away.
> ... after personally delivering a few of them several hours away.
Heh, and the cycle continues.
Interesting enough, he had these servers to run his "craft pencil" business where him and his wife made fancy pencils and sold them. I'm not sure why he needed more than 1 server to handle this (and Sun no less)(or even shared hosting) but I got a great deal.
I suppose there's no need to spend money on quiet cooling when they're going to be loaded into a warehouse of racks. I had to move it to the basement where I could still hear it at night.
Probably it was stock that never got used in that case. You'd never find liquidated servers with hard disks normally.
Disks are normally destroyed mechanically. About 10 years back I worked for a company that had this mechanical press that would gouge a large hole in the hard disk, shattering the platters but with SSDs I think industrial shredders are more likely.
It's probably very wasteful but better than leaking data I guess.