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Comment by phil21 | Hacker News Reader

Currently trying to source a large amount of DDR4 to upgrade a 3 year old fleet of servers at a very unfortunate time.

It's very difficult to source in quantity, and is going up in price more or less daily at this point. Vendor quotes are good for hours, not days when you can find it.

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Have you considered dropping by in person to your nearest computer recycler/refurbisher? As a teen I worked at one, and the boxes and boxes of RAM sticks pulled from scrapped machines (usually scrapped due to bad main boards) made a strong impression. They tend to not even put the highest-spec stuff they pull into anything, as refurbished machines are mostly sold/donated in quantity (to schools and the like) and big customers want standardized SKUs with interchangeable specs for repairability more than they want performance. Workers at these places are often invited to build personal machines to take home out of these “too good” parts — and yet there’s so much that they can’t possibly use it all up that way. If someone showed up asking if they could have some DDR3, they might literally just let you dig through the box and then sell it to you by weight!

> at these places are often invited to build personal machines to take home out of these “too good” parts — and yet there’s so much that they can’t possibly use it all up that way.

I work in the refurb division of an e-waste recycling company. Those days are over for now. We're listing RAM that will sell for more than scrap value (about $2 per stick), which is at least 4 GB DDR3. And we got a list of people who will buy all we got.

We are at a state, where used DDR4 gets bought large scale reballed and resold as refurb chips, because they are so rare.

We're looking to buy 1TB of DDR5 for a large database server. I'm pretty sure that we're just going to pay the premium and move on.

And that’s why everybody’s B2B these days. The decision-making people at companies are not spending their own money

I think it's not about own versus someone else's money.

Hardware is usually a small piece of the financial puzzle (unless you're building a billion dollar AI datacenter I guess) and even when the hardware price quadruples, it's still a small piece and delivery time is much more important than optimizing hardware costs.

The price of the hardware, even with inflated prices, is probably equal or less than the combined price of all the software licenses that go on that machine.

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