Stock pile of older generation hardware, thoughts on what to do with it?

[moulderhere]

I've been asked to deal with a rather LARGE stock pile of older hardware.

Everything literally from piles of Socket 939 motherboards, cpus, older ram, older hard drives (sata and ide), not many computer cases and some powersupplies.

I don't mean to say it is limited to socket 939 generation, I am using it as an example (one of the boards I have in my hand is 939 generation).

The person who collected it has passed away, and so there is a HUGE question mark on the quality of all the hardware. I literally can count 30 motherboards and thus far 200 hard drives around. I'd say in all total easily 1000 pieces of older generation computer hardware (thats not including all the ribbon cables, sata cables, etc).

With such a large collection of unknown status regarding working or not in mind. What do you think should be done???

I am asking this as I would like to think that the hardware is good and working, so at some point somebody will probably have to wipe all the hard drives, boot up all the motherboards and test all ram.
This would be an insane undertaking.

- Do you think its worth testing all of it?
- Questions like cost of hydro first come to mind when testing it (I'm not making much money removing it myself so power costs are a big concern if testing is to occur).
- Just worth going to scrap?

If this were you, what would you do? Honestly.

 

[kawininjazx]

Find a local scrap metal guy and get rid of it. Make sure to dent the hard drives.

If you find anything socket 775 core 2 duo or newer test it and maybe keep that, and any DDR2 memory over 1GB. Any SATA hard drives made after 2010 might be worth looking at.

You will probably get about $50-$80 for all the junk.

 

[gervap]

Bah, If you can't build 1 or 2 decent older Generation PC from the best of the crap, (so you could sell them) then I'd put it all to scrap or get in touch with any local "PC for school program" to give it for students taking IT courses in grade school.

 

[InvalidError]

I would simply make a list of everything in there and auction it off as a lot or a couple of smaller lots.

If you think there may be sensitive info on the HDDs, you might want to wipe them with at least a full-format but this may require 5+ hours per drive so you might want to scrap HDDs smaller than 200GB to spare yourself the hassle on drives that have almost no market value. If you have multiple USB drive boxes and multiple free root USB2/3 ports, you could format multiple drives at a time to make the process far more efficient.

 

[moulderhere]

I don't like the idea of running an auction on the hardware. I am not the type of person to make profit off something that may or may not work.

Plus if you knew that going into the auction you probably wouldn't buy anything.

 

[Praise_Gaben]

Keep at least the processors, they are the most interesting and don't take much space.

 

[InvalidError]

I am not the type of person to make profit off something that may or may not work.

That is going to make your life miserable with this lot of parts since you have just set yourself up for the painstaking job of testing the whole lot of junk before deciding what to do with it, which may not be worth it depending on what is in there, hence the importance of making a list of what actually is in there to get an idea of how much of it is potentially salvageable before going through all that effort trying to sell it.

I'm guessing most items in there are only worth $1-5 on the used market so if you value your time at $20/h, you cannot afford spending more than ~5 minutes testing each component.