Updated
Most used enterprise hardware in the world passes through here, and for chassis specifically it is usually the cheapest place to buy. The sellers who matter are the ones who do this at scale — decommissioning contractors and hardware brokers with thousands of feedback entries specifically on server equipment, not general marketplace volume.
Three habits do most of the work. Read the configuration out of the title and confirm it against the photographs, because titles are written to be found rather than to be precise. Treat a clear front-panel photograph as the most reliable specification in the listing — it tells you the bay count, the carrier form factor, and whether those bays contain carriers or blanks. And read the return terms before bidding, because returning a 70-pound chassis is expensive enough to change whether a marginal deal was a deal.
The trap here is the barebones listing, and it deserves its own section below because the arithmetic surprises people.
A class of specialist resellers buys decommissioned fleets, tests them, and sells configured machines with a warranty. We describe them as a class rather than ranking individual vendors, because we have not bought from them and a recommendation we cannot stand behind is worth nothing to you.
What the class offers is consistent: you specify the bay configuration, the memory, the controller and often the drives, and the machine arrives assembled and tested with somewhere to send it back. Prices are meaningfully higher than eBay and the gap is roughly the value of not doing the work yourself and not carrying the risk.
This is the right channel if you want a specific configuration rather than whatever came up for auction, if you want the storage controller to be the one you chose, or if you do not want to source carriers separately. It is the wrong channel if you enjoy the assembly and want the money to go into drives. Whatever a reseller states about warranty length and testing on its own site is what you should hold it to; treat anything we or anyone else says about a specific vendor as hearsay unless you can find it on their own pages.
This is the channel we can verify programmatically, which is why our chassis tables are Amazon rows. Prices here are typically above eBay for the same hardware, and we would rather state that than let live data imply it is the cheapest option.
What it is good for is certainty and a reference price. The listings are dated, the returns process is familiar, and the configuration is usually stated more explicitly than in an auction title. Use our live rows as a ceiling to negotiate against elsewhere, and as a way to see whether the market for a given model is moving.
Eight of our ten models have verified live listings; the other two show a dated estimate band instead, clearly labelled. Which is which is on each model's page.
IT asset disposal companies and electronics recyclers sell hardware by weight and by the pallet, and the prices reflect it. If you can visit, inspect and power on a machine before paying, this is the best value in the market by a wide margin — the same hardware without anyone in between.
The trade is total. No warranty, no returns, frequently no testing, and often no knowledge on the seller's part about what is actually in the box. Bring a monitor and a power cable if you can, and budget mentally for the chance that something is dead.
This is the skill that saves the most money, and it takes about five minutes to learn. Server listing titles are written in a compressed dialect that carries most of the information you need.
Bay count and form factor come first and matter most: “12 LFF”, “24 SFF”, “8B”. LFF is 3.5-inch, SFF is 2.5-inch, and the number is the front bay count. This is the single specification you cannot change later, because the backplane is fixed at point of purchase — see our 12 LFF versus 24 SFF comparison for what each locks you into.
Processors appear as “2X E5-2680 v4” — quantity and model. Memory as a total. The controller as “H730”, “HBA330”, “H240”, and that abbreviation decides whether the machine suits ZFS — our card decoder translates them.
What is absent is the important part. “NO HDD” means no drives. “NO RAM” means no memory. Silence about carriers usually means blanks, and “12x Trays” or “24x Caddies” in a title is a seller telling you they are included — which is worth real money and is why they mention it.
Take the most common listing shape on the market: a PowerEdge R730xd, 12 LFF, no drives, no carriers. Here is the arithmetic with today's live prices from our catalogue.
| Chassis, 12 LFF barebones | $719.99 (live) |
| 12 × carriers at $6.80 each | $82 |
| 12 × drives at $56 (4TB) | $672 |
| Parts to finish it (excluding chassis) | $753 |
The point of that table is the last row. Whatever the chassis costs, finishing it costs roughly $753 more at today's prices — and the carriers alone, the line nobody budgets for, are $82. A barebones machine that looks half the price of a configured one frequently is not, once you have finished it.
This is also why a listing that includes carriers is worth paying a premium for, and why “12x Trays” in a title is the seller flagging genuine value rather than padding. Our build calculator runs this arithmetic for any model and configuration.
Almost nobody buying a used chassis should be buying new drives to fill it. Recertified and refurbished enterprise drives are the normal supply, at a fraction of the price, and enterprise units are typically rated for a higher duty cycle than the consumer drives they undercut. What you trade is warranty length and inherited powered-on hours.
Our recertified drive guide covers what the grades actually mean and used drive value covers what a given age and capacity is worth, so you can tell a bargain from something being offloaded. For a parity array, check the recording technology before buying regardless of condition — no parity level rescues an array built on shingled drives.
8 in-stock listings · the larger half of the purchase, whichever channel you buy the chassis from · ranked by live cost per tb, refreshed every few hours
| Drive | Capacity | Interface | Recording | Condition | $/TB | Price | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| HP 695842-001 4TB SAS 6G 695842-001 | 4TB | SAS-6G | CMR | NEW | $14.00 | $56 | Buy |
| HP ST31000640SS 1TB SAS ST31000640SS | 1TB | SAS-6G | CMR | REFURB | $14.99 | $15 | Buy |
| HGST HUS724030ALS640 3TB SAS 6G HUS724030ALS640 | 3TB | SAS-6G | CMR | REFURB | $15.13 | $45 | Buy |
| Seagate 3TB Enterprise Capacity SAS 6G ST3000NM0023 | 3TB | SAS-6G | CMR | REFURB | $17.98 | $54 | Buy |
| HGST HUS726040ALS210 4TB SAS 12G HUS726040ALS210 | 4TB | SAS-12G | CMR | REFURB | $18.13 | $73 | Buy |
| Dell NWCCG 6TB SAS 6G NL Renewed NWCCG | 6TB | SAS-6G | CMR | REFURB | $18.33 | $110 | Buy |
| MDD 6TB SAS 12G 7200RPM MD6TSAS12872E | 6TB | SAS-12G | CMR | REFURB | $18.33 | $110 | Buy |
| HP 695842-001 4TB SAS 6G LFF 695842-001 | 4TB | SAS-6G | CMR | NEW | $19.67 | $79 | Buy |
The first hour with the machine is when problems are still returnable, and it is worth being systematic about it. Our verify-on-arrival checklist walks through the physical inspection, the power-on tests and the bay-by-bay drive detection that catches the expensive faults.
Two things are worth settling before you buy rather than after: the management licence, which does not appear in a photograph and decides whether you can administer the machine remotely, and where the machine is going to live, which is cheap to decide now and expensive to reverse once it is in the house.
It varies by seller, which is the problem. At minimum it means no drives. It frequently also means no drive carriers, which is the expensive part people miss, and it can mean no memory and sometimes no processors. A barebones chassis is not a cheap server — it is the first instalment on one. Ask the seller to confirm, item by item, what is physically in the box: drives, carriers, blanks, memory, processors, rails, bezel.
It is the volume channel and most of this market runs through it, so the question is really how to use it well rather than whether to. Buy from sellers with substantial feedback specifically on server hardware rather than general volume, read the configuration out of the title and photographs rather than trusting the summary, and treat a front-panel photograph as more reliable than any specification list. Pay attention to return terms before you buy, because a heavy chassis is an expensive thing to send back.
Often, and the reason is not that the hardware is better — it is frequently the same hardware. What you are buying is configuration-to-order, a tested machine, and a warranty of some length. If you want a specific bay configuration with specific memory and a controller you have chosen, a refurbisher will build that and eBay will not. If you are comfortable specifying and assembling yourself, that premium is money you could spend on drives.
Because we only publish prices we can verify programmatically, and that means Amazon. It is not the cheapest channel for chassis and we would rather say so than imply otherwise. What our live rows give you is a reliable price floor to negotiate against and a way to see the market moving. For the chassis itself, expect eBay to undercut what we show; for drives, carriers and controllers the gap is much smaller.
Cheapest of all, and it comes with no warranty, no returns and usually no testing. If you can inspect and power on the machine before money changes hands, this is a genuinely good channel — you are buying the same hardware without paying anyone to handle it. If you cannot inspect it, you are buying a lottery ticket. Either way, budget for the possibility that a component is dead, because there is nobody to send it back to.
Treat bundled drives as a bonus rather than as part of the value. They are usually the drives the previous owner had least reason to keep, and they arrive with an unknown number of powered-on hours. Check their SMART data on arrival — our drive health pages cover what the numbers mean — and price the machine as though the drives were not there. If they turn out to be good, you have got carriers as well, which is worth more than people expect.