So I like computers. I’ve played with them for years and spent a lot of time working my way into a career where I can work with tech on a daily basis.
At work I have access to piles of hardware, granted it’s not like what what the folks at LLT would have sitting around, but it’s still more than what a average person sitting at home would have sitting around. I still however maintain a decent pile of hardware at home to play with even though I have a large pile of gear to work with.
So why do I do that?
Well while I have a pile of gear at work to play with I don’t always get to have complete control over what I get to do with that hardware. In some cases projects that I want to play with or things that I want to do have nothing to do with what we are doing at work and I can’t really go and take work resources to mess with those projects. In some cases they will overlap and I can play with some interesting tools at work but a lot of what I’ve been playing with personally just does not overlap.
So the question becomes what hardware should you be using to build out a home lab?
Well what I did was just to reuse a lot of what I had sitting around from previous upgrades. Generally I would upgrade my primary machine every two or three years, and after a couple of years you wind up with a pile of older hardware sitting around that would otherwise be collecting dust so why not put it to work. The big advantage to this is that you already have the hardware sitting around and you won’t have to spend more money out of pocket to pick up stuff.
The other place where I have had some luck picking up hardware was from other people’s e-waste bins. A lot of companies still purchase hardware and rotate the hardware out within about three years or so depending on leases and other things. When that happens that gear can sometimes wind up finding its way to a recycler or refurbisher. At one point I came across a 11th gen i5 sitting in a e-waste bin and, at least from what I can tell, the only thing wrong with it was a broken wireless antenna cable. Even if you wind up buying the things devices that are a couple generations back show up on Ebay and local shops fairly cheaply, you might need to toss in some more RAM or a SSD but that’s still generally cheaper than a new machine.
The one thing that I try to avoid for the test stuff is buying things new.
That’s not to say that I don’t pick up new stuff from time to time. Personally I’m not a huge fan of used storage or other things that will eventually wear out like a mechanical hard disk or SSD eventually will. However a CPU? That doesn’t tend to wear out over time.
And honestly, If I’m going to drop 1200$ on a piece of hardware I would rather have it be the primary machine that I’m working on all day long rather than something that’s going to sit and run random docker images or other software that I decide to play with. Work is a different matter – there spending money on hardware that’s going to sit in the background and do stuff makes sense, but for home I would rather have the fancy toy sitting on my desk.
When you start this be willing to accept anything that you can get free or cheap, but don’t get attached to it. At some point you are going to wind up with too much gear and getting rid of it winds up being it’s own set of problems.