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Comment by theandrewbailey | Hacker News Reader

I work in e-waste recycling. Ever since the TurboQuant paper in March, I haven't been able to sell any DDR3. I'm guessing that the DDR2 and 3 this article is referring to is the actual memory chips, not modules/sticks that servers, desktops, laptops, etc. use, because the latter aren't moving.

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Yep. Don't expect to sell those sticks on ebay at great price. Those new chips will be likely soldered to appliances like low end routers/APs, set top boxes, various adapters, low end systems, PLCs, IPBX, NVRs and various embedded devices.

I sold 7,2 Kg of DDR1/2/3 sticks two month ago, for gold recovery. As well as expansion cards, hdd PCBs and a few other things. Got about $600 from this.

Did you cut the gold fingers off or "as-is"

Wild guess, but maybe China has something to do with that? They've got a huge "recover->break down/strip->recondition->sell refurbs to manufacturers" industry pipeline that doesn't seem to much exist outside of China.

Indeed, I was lucky that my PC is old enough to use DDR3 sticks, when I decided to upgrade a couple months ago. I think it's still cheaper to max out your RAM than to buy a new PC.

I thought the same until I calculated the cost of running DDR3. We’re at 0.35€/kWh so it adds up fast. Upgrading the motherboard and getting LPDDR4 sticks would be a net positive before the RAM prices soared.

Is it really that significant? We're talking watts difference and over a year maybe 100kWh difference? $35/year?

I don’t recall the exact numbers, and it’s not apples-to-apples but:

We have 4 sticks of DDR3 totalling 24GB. From what I remember, our home server uses about 70kWh/year to drive the memory. Buying 2 sticks of LPDDR4 would bring that down to about 5kWh (?).

At the time, I remember that a new motherboard and a couple of sticks would’ve paid for itself in 3 or 4 years, IIRC.

Maybe you have priced it wrong? I just checked Ebay, a 16GB 12800 Registered ECC module goes for 40-50USD ea. That is crazy! Last year they were like 5 USD each.

Except almost nobody buys them, even last years for 10 bucks each. That's almost useless ECC Reg memory for HPE Gen 8 servers and workstations (from before late 2015 / start of 2016 with the introduction of the Gen9 using DDR4).

ECC unbuffered DIMMs (9 memory chips per side, no reg buffer/controller) is less available, quite widely used on level entry systems and thus costs a lot more even second hand.

Agree. I was buying DDR3 16GB sticks for some laptops at $5/pop on eBay, now $60+ each.

Do you have any links? I remember DDR3 sodimms being maybe $.25-$.50/gb for low capacity (4gb), but 8gb+ sticks were always $.80-1+/gb.

I misremembered, it was $5 for 16GB DDR4 (not DDR3) sticks that I was paying on eBay. That might change the pricing.

Here's one I found in my email:

https://imgur.com/a/YWYpuzp

That's a great price for either, especially for DDR4. Only one stick though, right?

Yeah, I only bought single sticks at a time as I saw good deals on them. I only needed six sticks for three laptops. Just stuck a bunch of low bids and grabbed whatever I could. At the time there were tons going for $5-10 every day. Trying to stick to ones with free postage otherwise the postage would cost as much as the RAM back then.

That’s crazy, I bought a couple trays of DDR3 2 years ago for under $100 each.

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