Hardware prices be insane. I should pull all the memory out of my cluster and sell it right now.
Paying $128 for 16GB of used DDR4 2666 rdimms is fucking insane https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=pc4-21300+ecc+rdim
I paid less than $500 for wholesale lot of of 48 sticks 3 years ago.
Yeah. I bought a pair of 14tb drives and a year later they were almost 2x when I needed more.
But why?
Yup. I've been pricing out even older gear when I was expecting to upgrade by now.
I can only account for this year, but, I tracked prices of used server gear and specifically storage (memory and disk) trended with US sanctions. I can't say that's the cause, but that's the coloration I noticed.
Chassis, CPUs and just about everything else except for networking stayed on the same depreciation trend if you try to account for inflation. Ram is the most expensive part of a used server chassis right now. That excludes modern epyc, threadripper, and xeon saleables.
10G networking equipment was cheaper used for 4 years than 10 right now.
Servers built in 2014 are still being leased and deployed by smaller businesses.
I think the new stuff feels a bit like stagnation to a lot of people. Personally I noted that 4k monitors and 10g networking were the future years ago and just haven't happened in a real way. The monitors never came down in price. 10g SOHO scale gear doesn't seem to exist except single uplink sfp ports on 1g stuff. I replaced a 10 year old home server and the new gear isn't much faster, the difference is size and idle power consumption.
I would agree SOHO gear has stagnated big time, and yeah power draw is definitely not something to be overlooked. Latency is also kind of a thing. Newer gear can often be snappier while it uses less power. Now middle-grade enterprise gear is basically the same way. You can't really get a 24 port 10g switch for under $3000. The prices tell you everything. You buy the cheaper used gear and you pay the price in learning curve or tech dept.
Funny I did a little consumer hardware comparison. There is a reason the Ryzen 5900x is still holding it's price while everything else fell off. Because the price/performance (platform + memory included) isn't worth it. I've been looking for a cheap 5900x to upgrade my workstation to.
