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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?"
Find out if there's a compters for kids or pcs for kids program in your area. They make computers available to low income kids at a very affordable price by recycling donated computers. They could definitely use ram donations.
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.
...thats what they're good for
Ill take a handfull of those off of you!
I'll take 2, thanks.
try to sell them to ebay at $2 per dimm
They pick up the goods with a $15 check written to charity (to incent serious takers).
EAT THEM!
Could always treat the memory sticks as if they were legos and take pictures of the creative things you build. Then you can take a trip down memory lane (pun intended).
I don't know where OP is from, but in BC, Canada, there is a group called Computers For Schools BC, who are in the (government-funded) business of taking old computers and buffing them up for use in the school system. I suspect they would be pleased to receive something as close to current as 4GB DDR3... and they do enough volume that 500 of them would likely be used up in a month.
Find an organization that promotes (technology) causes that you like, and see if you can donate. Here's one that puts open source packages on donated hardware for poor kids - www.kidsoncomputers.org
They'll help your used chips find good homes in school computers and so forth: http://www.cristina.org/aboutus.html
Desktop or Server ram? Because server ram is generally ECC and cannot be used in desktops.
der dee der.
They're more likely to get more bang out of 2nd hand hardware. Additionally, there's always a need to upgrade hardware. Note, make sure you contact an administrator rather than a student employee in their IT departments. Odds are better the hardware will get put to use inside university machines rather than repurposed to supe up some undergrads private servers.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
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?
Tech like that tends to be great material for artists.
Dont mess with it just recycle them, ebay em, upgrades for personal computers, etc.... Unless you are personally going to end up with it. You probably are just wasting your companies time messing with it. But mostly just get rid of them. Though a 2TB ram drive would be awesome :)
Oem PCWorld has a memory buyback program - http://www.oempcworld.com/customer_service/buyback.htm. It might be worth contacting them to find out if they do larger quantities of what your suggesting.
RAM has a history of starting expensive for cutting-edge, getting dirt cheap as it becomes mainstream, then the old stuff gets expensive again when the market moves-on and it's in limited use. If an EBay search doesn't offer good value then most parts can be recycled these days, check with your local recycling center to see if they have a program to reclaim component materials.
Or, if you're looking for a laugh, ehow says you should consider making a sculpture. With the amount of RAM coming out of companies I bet you could do something person-sized :)
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I've got a load of car stereos I want to shift fast because..uh..I've upgraded to in-car mp3 players or something. Anyway, if you want a load of car stereos quick and aren't going to ask too many questions then get in touch.
Donate them to a local school system. Most schools' PC's have minimum specs to keep them cheap. Extra memory never hurt anything.
i second donation. we have a local one like this that we give old stuff to. they make good use of it
Let them have fun melting them down and separating out the constituent metals. They could cast the end-products into a little sculpture of a fist or something, as a warning to the EE department to show more deference to the true founders of modern electronics.
I will eBay them for 100% of sales price. Sell them, in bulk quantities as is, no returns. "Free shipping" because people like to feel they're getting a deal.
http://www.freegeek.org
I work at a school for special needs teenagers, and we could probably use about 200 of them if they were available.
Goodwill repairs and recycles computers.
Call me.
Put holes in the corners and connect them via metal rings. Create yourself a suit of nerd armor the likes of which has never been seen. With 500 DIMMs you should be able to get a chest piece or pair of gauntlets...
Steve over @ HardOCP is always putting together PC's for charitable causes.
Ram drives are great performance wise.
Build a giant RAM NAS!!! hehe
I once worked at a nonprofit that redistributed bulk PCs donations from large donors to many small nonprofits. We would get a hundred computers at a time and they almost always 1: had minimal RAM and 2: no hard drives. Any donations of RAM would be appreciated. If you have a similar charity in your area consider old hard drives (that are still working OK) as well.
I work at a school for special-needs teenagers, and we could probably use about 200 of them if they were available.
Paint them with coloured paint and use them as poker chips
You may find donating company assets is harder than you think.
Make a RAM disk
And you could build the absolutely coolest clubhouse, ever!
Also, I see geocachers attach these to Travel Bug dog-tags, and give them names like "I've lost my memory" and send them traveling.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Try to donate them as best as possible to a school or computer recyclers - although they do make GREAT Christmas tree decorations!
Either sell them all as one big batch, or in lots of 100. There are businesses and nonprofits that will buy them.
---------
There is inferior bacteria on the interior of your posterior.
I used to work for a non-profit called the Devereux Foundation, and we were always accepting computers from organizations that were upgrading. Most of the computers were Windows 98 vintage or older (in 2002) so they were horrendously underpowered at the time (and we were trying to shoehorn XP onto them), but an influx of additional RAM would have made a world of difference. If you can, call around and find out if there's a non-profit that would accept the DIMMs, especially if they're for desktop systems. I can't speak for the organization now, but there weren't many laptops floating around, and their group homes tended to be desktop only.
You can always donate them to a local Computers For Kids project.Believe me,any and all kinds of hardware is always needed.I ought to know.I've run such a program for a good 20 years
Geek Hillbilly
I use old burned out DDR3 sticks for a mirror decoration. They even have a little convenient hole to put a thread through.
Here's a charity local to me that builds PCs for the disadvantaged:
https://sites.google.com/site/carolinafreepc/
Purpose
To provide PCs with educational programs to low income
families and children at no cost.
Goals
To help kids become knowledgeable about computers
To interest kids in engineering and technology
To encourage kids to stay in school and graduate
find a time machine and sell them for $$$$$
or make keychains out of them, that was really hip back in the 90s
I most of my computers have 2 GB of RAM. I wouldn't mind to upgrade to, say, 8 GB
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Sell them, they are worth money.
Or does your company not use money?
There is no way a _well-planned_ upgrade would result in that much extra. Re-evaluate and correct the order if it isn't too late. Next time either keep a proper inventory of send the IT monkeys (a.k.a. interns) out to get one. Then fire the 1.D.10.T(s) in charge and donate their salary to a charity that aligns with your company's mission. This reaks of an "end of year dump" that made my blood boil when I worked for the government.
...a Beowulf cluster of these...
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
What sort of MB are you using that's loaded with DDR4?
Original PlayStation, model SCPH-5500-something if I remember correctly. It runs Dance Dance Revolution Konamix, the U.S. version of Dance Dance Revolution 4th Mix.
Oh, you meant that DDR4, the kind that can hold every Dance Dance Revolution song in one stick of RAM at once.
Do what my company does.
Don't let anyone have it and don't give it away, let it sit around in random boxes and storage rooms for YEARS. Personal come and go, the stuff moves around into different locations and boxes. Eventually no one has any idea how long it's been sitting there and what it was for or what it was from. Now you have to pay someone to take it away parts because you can't just throw it in the trash.
I looked on eBay just to get an idea. Although there are lots and lots listed for really high buy-it-now prices, the only real bids seem to be around $3-4 ea. If you consider handling, they're worthless to you. Donate them to somebody. Maybe try Craig's list. You get to meet some real weirdo's that way, just in time for Halloween.
Unless you have resources to build your own hardware, there is no use for those DIMM's, other than sale them.
Save them carefully in a box, and sell them in 30 years (2042)
Vintage hardware in good conditions get more value than Gold, or any other investment.
We had loooong time ago few hundred SIMM memories and it all felt too much work trying to sell those. So we came up with an idea to pull fishing line trough the holes, tying a knot at each end having them hanging nicely one top of each other. Then we used tiny nails and attached them hanging one strip next to each other to doorway from one end to another. Once completed we had one hell of a kind bug curtain (screen) at the doorway :)
It actually worked quite well couple of years and kept bugs out, before we moved the shop to another location when I thing it was lost.
A really big DIMMer!
I crack myself up.
Take down the AOL CD collage and tile the walls of your office with them. It will look cool and you can brag about you 2+TB walls!
It's times like this I miss aspects of the Amiga computers. They had a really friendly system for expanding ram. Most cards and drives came with extra ram slots. I never understood limiting ram expansion so severely. For computer graphics I see no top end in ram needs and I used to always say if your computer has slowed down nine times out of ten it's the ram not the CPU. 500 chips sounds like a couple of hundred gig of ram if the OSs and hardware would support the expansion.
let the employees take home a few if they have a use for them. Make people happy and it won't cost anything or at least not much depending on what you would otherwise do with them.
Just sell it on EBAY - you will be surprise how fast they will disapear
I think that the Linux4Africa project would be quite happy about such a donation.
that's quite a large... *puts on glasses* DIMM sum.
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.
PAINTBALL!
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
I still have several tubes of DIP DRAM chips. 256kX4 and 1MegX1 Plus a suitcase full of 74 series logic chips. You want them, you can take em!
Red
Free Geek teaches people (typically low wage, low education, high enthusiasm folks) to rehab computers, upgrade them from their parts bins, responsibly dispose of the rest, and load up some open source software.
They'd love to max out memory on their boxes, as it's usually the first thing to truly age out compared to current systems.
http://www.freegeekchicago.org/
I was going to write "For instance, I've searched for ECC SDRAM, and found only a handful of offers at all".
Slashdot could use an edit function...
C - the footgun of programming languages
You can send some my way.
I'm building my own Beowulf cluster and I really need some parts! My e-mail address is phrackwulf@gmail.com. What would convince you to part with them?
What would Richard Feynman do, if he were here right now? He'd do some math and he'd follow through!
You can populate a bunch of these, and give systems that could use it an "ssd" read and write cache
http://www.ddrdrive.com/ddrdrive_x1_p3.png
In Portland, we havve Free Geek, which will take your unwanted hardware and turn it into systems and sell them cheap or give them away. (The build program which allows anybody to put in some time building computers and walk away with their own system as a reward, particularly tickles me.) You can certainly ship your DIMMs to them, though there might well be a similar effort closer to you.
Just in case it hasn't been asked yet, were these sticks from workstations or servers? ECC or non-ECC, buffered or unbuffered, etc.? Can't really mix types, so if it's server RAM, for practical purposes, it's not going to work in home/school PCs.
And this is where somebody needs to out-nerd me and tell me how I'm wrong and call me names.
I'll take four.
ECC or Non-ECC.. if it's ECC then good luck finding many home users that can use it.
--- If the bible proves the existence of God, then Superman comics prove the existence of Superman.
In 1999 or 2000, my local computer store put keyrings on the old Pentium-era 8 MB RAM chips and sold them for $5 apiece. At the time, I laughed because I remember having to pay $75 for the chip when it was new.
The guy that says to save them is probably correct. However, I have a few now-useless 256MB DDR chips that don't go anywhere. My PCs with DDR RAM don't need them, and my boat anchors won't accept them. I feel your pain.
I've got a couple I've had for years that I have as keychains. Slap a keyring on them and sell them as keychains fot 10 bucks each at local novelty stores or on Ebay.
I used to have a good sig...
Donate the DIMMs to http://www.cincinnaticomputercooperative.org/ . The work they do to prevent computers from ending in landfills in addition to the schools, churches and the needy who get the reconditioned computers is very worthwhile.
You should populate a few ramdiscs of course. Faster than flash!
http://www.storagereview.com/corsair_vengeance_ddr3_ram_disk_review
http://blog.laptopmag.com/faster-than-an-ssd-how-to-turn-extra-memory-into-a-ram-disk
I'm too lazy to look them up right now but there are also boxes that accept several rows of RAM for a huge ramdisc.
Fastest possible storage.
If you combine them, 500 DIMMs should be plenty to make at least four or five BRIGHTs.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
and label it MEMORIES.
a brooch or a pterodactyl
My mum has reached that age where she can't remember shit (or even where to shit). I figure if you send me one, I might be able to insert it into her head and turn her into some kind of cyber-grandma. In fact, best send two or three, there's a good chance one or two may get broken hammering them in.
...to read this whose first thought was "Woo hoo! Big-ass RAM disk!"?
Apparently, there are SATA RAM disk assemblies out there, although apparently none that will work with DDR3 RAM (not that a quick search could find at least).
RAID (or perhaps LVM containerize) a pile of these suckers together, add in all those DIMMs, and you could have some seriously fast storage on your hands.
Practical? Probably for limited applications. Damn cool? Absolutely! It would be a like a Beowulf cluster of RAM disks...
Yaz
Many states have a StRUT (Students Recycling Used Technology) program. Oregon, for example has a website here: http://www.strut.org/. You can donate used computer equipment and students learn how to put it together and place computers in the classroom or students' homes. That's how I got my start in technology. It's a great cause.
Not that there isn't any merit to your point, but come on. DDR3 DIMMs are still of use to even mid-range new desktops, the very sort K-12 would buy!
I'm poor and my i7 that i saved up all my money for has bad ram that keeps dying.
I'll take a couple chips.
thanks!
Be seeing you...
Donate them to your local hackerspace.
A school would gladly welcome those DIMMs!
Depending on the DIMM itself you might be able to sell them to a company that recycles them and extracts the precious and semiprecious metals out of them.
Specks
Batteries not included
http://freegeekorg/ is a 501(c)(3) which ethically repairs and recycles computers and components, benefitting schools and non-profits. The City of Portland and multiple non-profits donate equipment already.
There is nothing wrong with yr Internet. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling the transmission - NSA
The contacts are gold. Sell them to a person who specializes in gold retrieval from computer hardware.
- A Frog in a pond utters an azure cry. -
this thing will sell like hot cake in India
post in ebay.in global sell section.
I don't know what universe you are from. In mine they went to maybe 4 meg, Got a bunch of 1 meggers.
How much does an SGI Altix (or five) cost nowadays?
And... I just lost my main PC in the hurricane =( I just need a few...
William J Beard
6517 Pilgrims cv
Derwood MD, 20855
240.314.9703
If not...
Thanks anyway =)
I'll point out Sherpa Consulting as a place that would take them.
EOM
They will always appreciate a sizable donation of working computer components!
Last year, my company cleared out a HUGE amount of PCs for RAM ugrades due to requirements of a new software package. We ended up with tons of used 256 MB DIMMS.
So... I built a DIMMgerbread house as a Christmas decoration, using hot glue Seriously. It was kinda fun
You could donate them to me. *sage nod* I would give them good homes.
I'll take 4 if they're going spare...
You could go for this -> www.fiehnlab.ucdavis.edu/staff/kind/Collector/Benchmark/RamDisk/ramdisk-benchmarks.pdf
A couple of ram drives doing 5-6gbps and almost endless read write cycles. What more could you want from a drive?
This is why we need a new version of the HyperDrive RAM disk , since the current HyperDrive 5 only supports non-ECC DDR2...
http://www.acard.com/english/fb01-product.jsp?idno_no=271&prod_no=ANS-9010B&type1_idno=9&ino=123
What did the company exchange it for ?
I have, in my quite modern machine, that runs most every game full speed @ max settings, 4x4 sticks 1866 MHz RAM. This is a huge overkill for everything, most people settle for 8 GB and that is with a healthy safety margin.
If the company is getting rid of 4GB sticks (one stick is enough for a normal-range desktop system to function properly on modern desktop OS. throw in a second 4GB if you want to overkill stuff), what are they replacing it with ?
Also, DDR3 RAM is modern and current, and in wide use, not some legacy abomination.
Is this article from the future or just a subtle troll ?
In worst case, you cn list it @ 10 bucks a stick on ebay (going price ~14-15 per stick) and make $5K FAST.
I have nothing to lose but my bindings.
Make a RAM Drive! Try one of these products and insert your RAM. Then you have the FASTEST Hard Drive in the world! http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/hyperos-dram-hard-drive-block,1186.html http://techreport.com/review/9312/gigabyte-i-ram-storage-device