Ask Slashdot: What To Do With Over 500 Used DIMMs?

An anonymous reader writes "My company is pursuing a RAM upgrade, resulting in 500+ used DDR3 4GB DIMMs. What could this be used for? Are there any cheap products on the market which can take a huge number of DIMMs? Is there a worthy cause we should donate the gear to?"

eBay...

[kevin_j_morse]

Why not just sell them? Slashdot always has to find creative things to do with old stuff. Just sell it and use the money for something else.

ECC?

[nion]

Desktop or Server ram? Because server ram is generally ECC and cannot be used in desktops.

The obvious answer

[Anonymous Coward]

Few people are going to need 500+ DIMMs.

If your company really wants to help a worthy cause, why not put the work in, sell them all individually on eBay, and then donate the revenue to a charity of your choice?

Re:Goodwill

[ackthpt]

Goodwill repairs and recycles computers.

We have something called The Grey Bears, which recovers and recycles working computers for low prices. Might be something like that in your community.

One cautionary word, though. Make absolutely certain your employer is completly cool with you gathering these up and sending them off to worthy causes, get it in writing lest some stuffed shirt bureaucrat or bean counter come around and claim you took company property - some employers have very bizarre ways of handling disposal of assets, even stuff like old, broken printers or CRT monitors, which you and I would think are largely worthless, they have numbers on books which state otherwise.

Re:eBay...

[mobby_6kl]

First: Hold onto them until they're actually worth something. Sometime in the middle of the DDR4 lifecycle, it will become nearly impossible to find new 4GB DDR3 sticks, so people will have to turn to used sticks if they want to upgrade their machines from 8GB (4x2GB or 2x4GB) to 16 GB (4x4GB).

History tells us that they will be valued at at least twice the original market rate. So sell now and get ~$7.5k, or wait 2-3 years and likely get $15-20k. I'd wait.

That's a good point. I just had to RMA a module of extended-warranty DDR2 RAM. Ignoring for a moment the fact that they asked me to send the whole kit instead of just the faulty module, more importantly instead of replacing it, they refunded me the money instead. Which is just slightly less money than what new (and slower!) DDR2 memory costs. Oops.

In the end I managed to find the last few identical kits in some weird online store, but another year or two and I'd be completely fucked.

Re:eBay...

[caffiend666]

Just because something is worth a certain amount, does not mean it can be sold for that amount or that it is worth the time to sell something or warehouse it for years. Grandpa still has his tubes from his tv repair days. They are doubtlessly worth thousands. But, no one will pay fair value for them in bulk and it would take hundreds if not thousands of hours to sell them individually on ebay. It would have been better for him to sell them when he retired, even at a loss, and invest the money.

Re:PCs for Kids

[Sponge Bath]

Listen to this guy, do not futz around trying to think up uses or store them expecting to have a use in the future. Give it away now and be done with it. Soon it will be obsolete and no use to anyone. (says the man who recently trashed a bag of dusty, obsolete and now useless RAM)

Re:eBay...

[sl4shd0rk]

Sometime in the middle of the DDR4 lifecycle machines using DDR3 will be about as popular as ones using SDRAM right now.

Donate it to the kids projects mentioned above. Besides, if you sell it, your going to be fielding support calls from people with crappy systems who think your "bad used ram" is to blame.

Re:eBay...

[tibit]

Thousands of hours to sell those tubes? That's crazy talk. Even eBay itself offers a bulk listing service, where you can easily list hundreds of items. It'd be trivial to sell the tubes, and they may be worth a good chunk of money as the audiophools value some of them dearly. Their stupidity, your gain.

Re:PCs for Kids

[eyrieowl]

So..."I had it rough, the school district should continue to suck and give future generations the shaft"? Were they supposed to chug along with Apple II's until you came riding to the rescue? Also, are they never supposed to buy any new computers? Bear in mind that if they ever do, any older computers someone tries to donate shortly afterward would, likely, be "too old".

Re:PCs for Kids

[jessecurry]

No, but they can reduce their tax burden while gaining some control over where their resources help the community.

Re:PCs for Kids

[sumdumass]

lol.. no one but someone from the district office could "fix them" and you relegate them as "useless shit".

I think the problem is more to the effect of you not knowing what you had and an attitude by someone who didn't want to deal with it. Schools can put their bulk license of any windows version on the computers and send them home as loaners to the less fortunate students and forget to ask for them back. Would do a lot more for "education" then tossing donations into the trash.