Home / Why identical servers differ
This is the question behind every "why aren't your prices on the site?" email. Here is the long answer, with the actual mechanism laid out.
Put two Dell PowerEdge R740s side by side. Same model, same generation, same year, same paint. On any price list that publishes a figure per model, they are the same line item.
In practice one of them can be worth several times the other. Not ten per cent — several times. Here is where that gap comes from, component by component.
| Server A | Server B | |
|---|---|---|
| Chassis | PowerEdge R740, 8-bay | PowerEdge R740, 8-bay |
| Processors | Two Silver 4110, 8 cores each | Two Gold 6248R, 24 cores each |
| Memory | 64 GB — 4 × 16 GB | 768 GB — 24 × 32 GB |
| Drives | None — pulled, no caddies | 8 × enterprise SAS, in caddies |
| Controller | Onboard | PERC with cache and battery |
| Power supplies | One fitted | Two fitted |
| Rails | Left in the rack | Included |
Both are honestly described as "Dell PowerEdge R740". Both would be the same row on a published price list. One is a fully specified production machine somebody can rack tomorrow. The other is most of a chassis.
A pair of entry-level Silver parts against a pair of high-core-count Gold R parts is not a marginal difference. Sixteen cores in total versus forty-eight, and the higher-tier parts hold their value considerably better because they are still wanted for production workloads. More on processor value →
Four modules against twenty-four, and 16 GB modules against 32 GB ones. In a well-populated machine the memory is routinely worth more than the server around it. This is why stripping RAM out before valuation is such a common and expensive mistake — you are usually removing the most valuable part and keeping the least valuable.
Whether the drives stay with the machine is your commercial choice and we price it either way. But the caddies are a different matter. Server B's drives are in caddies. Server A has neither drives nor caddies, so anyone buying it has to source eight caddies before it can hold a disk.
If you are keeping your drives, take them out of the caddies and send the caddies with the chassis. It takes a few minutes per machine and empty caddies carry real value in their own right. Across a rack of machines it adds up to a meaningful amount for very little effort.
A single PSU means no redundancy, which rules the machine out for a lot of buyers outright. A proper RAID controller with cache and a healthy battery is a priced component. Rail kits left screwed into the rack are, from a valuation point of view, simply money left behind — and they are the most commonly forgotten item in any decommission.
Because it would be wrong for nearly everyone who read it.
To publish a figure per model, a buyer has to pick one of two options. Either quote the low end, which under-values every well-specified machine and insults the people with the good hardware. Or quote the high end, which reads as a promise nobody can keep and produces a difficult conversation when the kit is inspected and the real figure lands lower.
Both are worse for you than being asked for a list. The published figure that looks like transparency is usually just the start of a negotiation you did not know you had entered.
You send the list. We come back in writing, priced per unit, so you can see exactly what each line is worth before you decide anything. If a line is worth very little we tell you that too, rather than burying it in a batch figure.
Pricing hardware by the kilo has the same problem, only worse — it ignores specification entirely. Server A and Server B weigh roughly the same. Anyone valuing them by weight is telling you they are not valuing them as servers at all.
We price per unit, on what the hardware is worth working. That is the whole basis of what we do: we buy machines that were in service and working when they came out, and we sell them on to be used again.
Send the list and we will tell you, line by line. Most people are surprised by which machines are carrying the value — it is rarely the ones they expect.
Get my priceEnough to identify each machine, and anything you know about its configuration:
If that sounds like more than you have to hand, it does not matter. A photo of the asset tags, a service tag list, or a CMDB export attached to the form all work. We will do the identifying — that is our job, not yours.
Send us the list. You'll have a written per-unit valuation back within one working day.
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