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

Posted by samzenpus on from the dimm-house dept.

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?"

12 of 291 comments (clear)

  1. PCs for Kids by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:PCs for Kids by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      IANAA (I am not an accountant), but AFAIK, in the US, as long as the company didn't depreciate the capital on the computer overall, they can write off the full cost of the RAM against their taxes if they donate it to a charitable organization. Added up, it can be a rather sizable chunk of money, and can even offset the cost of the upgrade by a considerable margin. Win-win situation.

    2. Re:PCs for Kids by __aawbkb6799 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      This. My first thought was http://freegeek.org/ if there's one near your locale.

    3. Re:PCs for Kids by asdf7890 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I'd have not chucked them unless they were _really_ old, or you only had a few.

      I had a small pile of various DIMMs (and SIMMs though I doubt the buyer was really interested in them!) when I last cleared out all my old junk. Single auction on eBay for the whole lot (individually they aren't worth enough for the hassle of listing and dealing with idiots, but together they made a lot worth bothering with) and let someone else deal with finding uses for them (or splitting into smaller lots and reselling).

      You'd be surprised how much you might make. Memory of older standards is often useful in printers (sometimes relatively new devices) and such which don't need the high falutin super sonic speeds of newer standards, not just for people looking to extend the life of very old kit on the cheap. And 4Gb DRR3 modules as mentioned here are definitely still worth something, especially in that sort of number. What my company tends to do when getting rid of old stuff like this is drop the money made into the social fund - the furniture sold on after our move to shiny new offices recently has paid for an upgraded Christmas dinner for us all this year!

      Or like the guy above says: donate and someone else will deal with finding a use for them. Either way there is far less chance that it'll all just become toxic land-fill. From a company's PoV donating may provide a tax break.

    4. Re:PCs for Kids by Skynyrd · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Long ago I worked for a school district. We accepted computer donations, but it was usually disaster, and more expensive than buying a new one.

      Every machine had a slightly different version of the OS, and a different set of applications. There was no consistency between machines, and nobody at the school could do real maintenance on them; it required a person from the district office to drive there (this was long ago, as I said) and fix the machine. Maintaining a hodge-podge of machines was a nightmare.

      When we stopped taking random donations, it made everybody's job more efficient. We threw away a *huge* pile of "useful" computers (at least that's what the person dropping off old, useless shit called them).

      Seriously, your school district is better off not accepting donations of one or two computers. It doesn't scale. At all.
      If it was "a bunch" and they had a legal version of Windows or OSX (Linux if they have a full time Linux guy on staff), and they were identical and they could replace *everything* in an existing computer lab, then it may have been a bad decision.

  2. Probably just recycle, but check value first by Wrexs0ul · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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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  3. Check with accounting by whoda · · Score: 4, Interesting

    You may find donating company assets is harder than you think.

  4. Re:eBay... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  5. Re:eBay... by slartibartfastatp · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Capitalistically thinking, if nobody would pay thousands for it, then it's not worth thousands. The market is not really into fair pricing.

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  6. Re:eBay... by thorbsd · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Assuming you could get $20 per DIMM, you're looking at $10,000. Not to make it sound that isn't a lot of money, but when you consider that a company has 500 4GB sticks of RAM they can't use, you have to assume that this is (likely) a pretty big company, and $10,000 is probably not all that much in their total IT budget. Even if you forget about the potential benefit a donation like this could bring to the community that they currently operate in, think about how much more value they could get from the PR of donating to a good cause.

  7. Re:eBay... by DerekLyons · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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

    Translation: I'm pretty sure they're worth money, lots of money. But I actually don't have any evidence this is so, and can't be bothered to do the work and find out.

    I saw lots of people just like you and your Grandpa when I ran a used and rare bookstore that thought the same thing... invariably, they were wrong.

  8. Re:eBay... by N3Bruce · · Score: 4, Interesting

    When you get into obsolete parts, they generally fall into 3 categories. With the example of radio and TV tubes, there is a large percentage of the stock that is essentially worthless, everybody has them and nobody wants them. Compactron tubes in 1960s TVs are all over the place, but few people collect old TVs, and most have been junked. Second category is tubes which have a steady demand, but were made in large numbers, such as some of the tubes in the "All American Five" radios, and vintage ham and audio gear. The third category is tubes and parts for highly collectible gear, especially where specialized tubes were made for only a few models of equipment for a few years and are classified as Unobtainium. Some of the tubes in my Zenith Transoceanic radio fall into this category, a good used 1L6 goes for about $50 on Ebay, while I have a half a dozen perfectly good 5U4 rectifier tubes in my junk box. After a while, if a certain model of audio or radio gear has lasting appeal, the supply will eventually dry up. 6146 tubes are starting to fall into this category, commonly used as final amplifier tubes in many popular ham rigs, despite wide use in many applications.

    This phenomenon happens with all types of vintage collectibles, because most examples of a particular item will have the same part that tends to fail or deteriorate.