Wondering if we're going to have a situation in the future where we end up having to buy the hand-me-downs from industry after they're done with them (and thus kind of outdated tech)? Kind of seems like the days of building your own PC are numbered.

This is already happening in the NAS HDD space. Prices on new units have been stagnant or rising for a couple years now.

It's been happening in all spaces.

There are reputable eBay sellers shipping decomm'd previous-gen servers for bargain basement prices.

If you're fine running last gen (and you should be, for home lab use) then it's worth it to monitor prices over time.

They typically hit a floor, as supply from decomm waves coinciding swamps demand, but the resellers still want to move things as quickly as possible.

Honestly, it's actually pretty awesome the deals you can get on used enterprise gear.

At the cost of power consumption. My small homelab is already at 600Ws which is around 290$/mo in california.

I prefer to just not think about it and blame charging my car. Also in Cali.

I don't know if I'd buy any of the servers or older computers but the internal components are pretty dang good. Stuff like hard drives, network cards, hbas, that's the real money saver right there.

For sure.

I upgraded my home rack to use cx3 cards, and I sport a ds4246 that has a single 18tb sas hard drive in it lol.

Kind of cool I have 56gbps network between them, tho I can only get 30gbps at max in iperf3 lol (due to some pcie bw limit)

I think that’s off by a factor of 10.

What direction

Is there a particular reason you're in California?

Work.

Even the hand-me-down situation has been changing. I remember in the 2010s being able to shop at Weird Stuff in Sunnyvale, which was a treasure trove of old enterprise equipment, a heavenly place for a retrocomputing enthusiast like me. I even bought accessories for my NeXTstation there! The shop kept the good retro stuff in the back away from the general public for people who asked kindly about retro gear :). I saw some 1980s and 1990s classic Macs, too, in the restricted area.

Unfortunately Weird Stuff is a thing of the past, though this had less to do with a reduced supply of surplus and more to do with Silicon Valley’s high real estate prices. Thankfully there are still good stuff to be found at e-waste recyclers, but if more companies are relying on the cloud, and if more devices are integrated boards with everything soldered on (such as most modern Apple hardware), the hand-me-downs of the future are going to be harder to work on than today’s hand-me-downs. I’m just an average software guy whose hardware experience is limited to a graduate-level computer architecture course and building PCs. I can talk about caching and branch prediction, but I’ve never picked up a soldering iron in my life; I’m no Louis Rossmann.

  They are rerouting RAMs for consumers to enterprise for server build up

Enterprise? No. Micron is explicitly focusing on AI.

Enterprise as in the level of support and care these products will come with, as opposed to consumer or business.

Hyperscalers and even "smaller" shops by comparison, such as CoreWeave, TerraWulf, Lambda.ai.

So yes, enterprise customers doing AI data centre buildouts. They are going all out for them at the expense of their consumer business due to supply constraints.

I don't see this situation changing for many years to come. Would indirectly affect the cost of any electronics that has storage or memory on it. Would be interesting to see how Samsung plays this one out with their limited inventory - they make RAM + SSDs, use it themselves on their phones, laptops, etc. Also supply to consumer and business customers. Interesting times.