Comment on Tech hobbyists, How are you avoiding the crazy prices for computers and newer tech?
neidu4@piefed.social 1 day ago
I scavenge old hardware from work. My rack is now com0lete (hardware wise, at least), as I powered up the JBOD cabinet today, consisting of a bunch of harddrives left over from disk upgrades at work. It’s a bunch of 10TB and 3TB SAS drive. That server used to be an automation controller, now it’s my storage server. I had 160G of DDR3 RAM laying around from a machine I retired a while back, which is nice to have with ZFS.
My VPN concentrator was a datalogger for two industry robots.
My web crawler was supposed to be a test-server for the software department, but they needed to upgrade.
The only new hardware is my game server, and RAM was over half the price.
My networking hardware is also from work, as I detest consumer grade networking hardware.
queerlilhayseed@piefed.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
It’s not worth the downsides, but a major upside of working for a large tech outlet is getting to pick over the massive amount of tech refuse they cycle through. Being able to snag 2-3 year old pro equipment for free is an undeniably tempting perk.