331
Datacenter rush will create ‘tsunami’ of discarded electronics, report says
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2026
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One of the good things that could come from this is the flood of cheap used hard drives and RAM which will hopefully drop used prices back down…beyond that everything else about this just sucks.
Those cheap drives will have been run really hard, though. I don't know how much I'd trust them with anything important.
We'll all be running RAID, buying 18TBs by the dozen
Pretty much what I was thinking except at the 24-26TB level lol 😎
Same but like 3-4TB 🥸
Same but 4G
True it depends largely on the manufacturer of the drives but yah agreed, likely to be used harder than your typical large scale vps/web server hosting company but, still, its gotta help the pricing market some because its just bonkers expensive now for used drives.
The whole point of this ai thing is so they can make it impossible to have a computer you own in your house. theyre probably just going to shred everything
That is certainly possible, but at the other end is the argument that these corps are greedy as all hell so they will likely try to profit reselling the used hardware as well given the current market for it.
If their plan doesn’t work they’re going to crash the economy so hard that RAM and storage will be the last thing on anyone’s mind. This is why they think they’re invincible.
If they thought they were invincible, they wouldn't be building bunkers and prepping.
Ohh so true…my comment applies to the status quo so yah…if we go into an extended recession then yah…
The ram will all be server ram sadly, which is great for us homelab people, but sadly doesn't solve the gonna consumer ram problem.
Maybe everyone just makes a huge homelab now with all that ram and we all just stream our games instead of worrying about a beefy pc lol
If there is a glut of ram that can only be used in specific machines then someone will find a way to modify systems to use it. Or I can see a company buying up huge stores of it and release consumer products that use it.
and if the server market is flooded with cheap used ram it will be less profitable for ram manufacturers to make more server ram, so they will shift to making more consumer ram. the exact opposite thing crucial just did.
Server RAM isn’t much different from PC ram - same slot, etc.
Probably has less RGB. If it’s used in storage it’s probably ECC? It’ll work in your PC though. Not everyone needs 8kMT/sec
It's a different standard, different pinout, look up HBM
Mechanically and electrically incompatible
Probably there will be some kid smelting chips in some third world country for some pennies in exchange of lung cancer, and some other resoldering them on AliExpress cards
Not all data center memory is HBM, there's still plenty of standard DDR4 (ECC) & DRR5 used in production as it's easier and cheaper to replace if it fails. Although, you are correct that a lot of it is HBM.
I look forward to having Grace Hopper chips remanufactured onto ATX boards in half a decade or so, but it's still cold comfort that we can't have affordable hardware today.
Most consumer boards don't support ECC or registered memroy. If you're lucky yours will, but I wouldn't count on it at all.
Lots of AMD boards do, actually.
I don't think that's going to be the case. All that bitcoin mining stuff, completely used up and mostly worthless at this point, and by the time the next (or two generations) comes out, so much of the old serve stuff is expensive to run, and then unsupported. I think re-use is great, but at a point real recycling needs to be the better option.
I just saw a video yesterday on hacking old bitcoin mining GPUs to unlock their RAM and PCI bandwidth and whatnot for general-purpose use. Desperation is the mother of invention, after all.
Yah fully embedded hardware that isn’t user serviceable will be junk and I agree recycling needs to be an option, but sadly we aren’t at the price point where it’ll be economical for companies to do so. Prices need to escalate significantly from these levels to do so otherwise we would be seeing it happen already.
If they even put them back on the market instead of having them destroyed in case they had something stored that could cause them to be sued.