Slashdot Mirror
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.
EAT THEM!
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.
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?
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.
http://www.freegeek.org
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.
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.
You may find donating company assets is harder than you think.
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
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
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.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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
Shiny things swaying in your field of vision while you are responsible for controlling a 3000 pound vehicle without hitting people. Brilliant.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
...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.
Someone really screwed up, and didn't RTFA.
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
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.
$3? You're looking at active listings to gauge final selling price. Most bids these days come in the last hour or the last minute of the auction on auction-style listings. Either look at Buy-it-now prices, or select "Completed Listings" on the lefthand side of a search.
I'm seeing roughly $15 each average. Search settings.
1,081 results found for 4gb ddr3 -2x -1gb -2gb desktop
Preferences: Buy It Now, Completed listings
RAM expansion is limited so severely because the speed of light has a huge impact on performance these days. The bus latency is a huge factor.
Windows 7 lets you add slow RAM with ReadyBoost. Not sure if Linux lets you do anything like that. But it's just not as fast as RAM that's only an inch away from the CPU.
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!
IBM PCs of the era had a similar option: attach the RAM to the ISA bus via an add-on card. Like the Amiga (and most computers of that era), the expansion bus was the processor bus (with a bit of buffering and maybe a tad bit of glue logic, but not much more).
As processor speeds increased, this became a problem. Many peripherals just weren't designed for the increased speed, so they divorced the bus speed from the processor speed by making it a fraction of the processor speed (ISA) or going asynchronous (Amiga Zorro III). This became quite pronounced with PCI (max 66MHz, even if you're running a 3.0GHz CPU); you can add memory onto the bus, but it will slow you down if you try to use it as main memory.
That doesn't mean it can't be used at all these days. The cluster computer folks have a concept called NUMA, or non-uniform memory access, where memory isn't considered necessarily equal in speed. Or you could treat it like a very fast SATA drive, provided you have the necessary means of keeping power to it during power failure events (or use it only as temp or swap space).
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...
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.
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I had two 1-bit 6-lead toroid memories in clear epoxy. Made them into neat cufflinks. They were stolen in Amsterdam (shouldn't have taken them off)..