Sysadmins pay inflated prices for Dell servers
16 posts across 3 communities in the last 30 days; 56% from r/sysadmin.
“i don't mind people looking at ebay for a baseline and then discounting a tiny bit from there, but my problem is they're trying to get the exact same price as on ebay, despite having less guarantee of receiving the right thing on your end and there being 0 seller feels going to…”
“100+ upgrades from 2016 to 2025 without issue. Only done a couple 2022s”
“Their support is HORRIBLE. I've had an issue with my server for months where every friday, it'll drop to read only. Only on friday mornings. It took a month initially to get them to replace the root nvme. That worked for about a month then it started happening again. Now their…”
Multiple sysadmins report significant price increases on Dell servers, with quotes exceeding $40,000 per server compared to previous purchases of around $11,000. One user found cheaper refurbished alternatives from Lenovo and another suggests buying extra as spares.
SOURCES (60)
“For some organizations its impractical to buy refurbs, for small business its almost a requirement now, 3 year old servers for 2k in relatively good shape, but you still need New drives and controllers, never buy used drives for production systems. [re: This feel surreal...]”
“Just bought a Lenovo Server that was $3k in late 2025. Couldn't put it in the budget last year but just ordered it and it was $13k for a 1u server with a raid card, 32gb ddr5 ecc and 2 - 1.92 TB SSD, dual PSU..... This crap has wrecked our brand new FY that started 2 weeks ago. I'm going to be scraping for another 11 months. Edit: $1,900 for each 16 GB stick of DDR5 ECC. Made me sick to sign the PO. [re: BOSS Card prices on new Dell servers]”
“If I had started half a year later, it would've been a Dell OptiPlex with 16GB RAM and an i5 8th Gen for 10€ from my workplace. But because I didn't have that ressource at that time and myself not knowing anything about self hosting bought some OEM Zen 3 CPU with iGPU and put it into my old desktop case for way more money. All for Plex (everthing manual back then) and as a NAS to backup data to. After that I learned a thing or two in my apprenticeship and upgraded to an i5 13500T, becaus”
“These price rises are more to do with scaling up for future returns, not really because of what's happening now. Whether AI fulfils its promises to enterprise to increase profitability or not isn't certain and some companies are sure to fall by the wayside.”
“Not in this case. Consumers aren't the primary income earner anymore. We are lucky they are selling to us at all. WD said screw consumers we now only supply datacenters.”
“We should be blaming the manufacturers for not being prepared for the demand. Not using AI is like not using a tractor during the industrial revolution. If you don't keep up you will lose your business.”
Long term storage is why they use HDDs. Way more data per dollar
“So, I know there are few questions that haven’t already been asked, but RAM prices have skewed my thinking. Last year bought a Dell R730 server from a guy off FB he was playing with in his homelab. When his work upgraded their servers, he decked out one of the old ones for himself.1500w rackmount UPS, an old POE switch and a bunch of spares and the full-sized NetShelter rack for $1000. 8x2TB SAS drives and 768GB of DDR4 RDIMM. I am using the rack and UPS for ham radio gear and was going to run P”
“You can get an Optiplex with 8GB RAM for under $100 on eBay. If you can work within those limitations you're ahead of the competition.”
“i don't mind people looking at ebay for a baseline and then discounting a tiny bit from there, but my problem is they're trying to get the exact same price as on ebay, despite having less guarantee of receiving the right thing on your end and there being 0 seller feels going to ebay when selling person to person. basically i'd be paying ebay prices without any ebay features just for the heck of it.”
“True. I 100% bought these for DSM's because for what we were paying for Datto was obscene and management wanted to cut some costs. The savings paid for the NAS and drives within 3 months and while I haven't had to restore data from it very often, I have been able to do that when needed.”
“it doesn't matter, Synology Hardware is shit and way to expensive anyway, if you want Synology you want it for their good software solution. Ofc you can build you own NAS or server way cheaper and just run docker containers for all your needs, but you do not receive support for doing so”
“I think you said elsewhere that there was no PC tech shop within a short distance to the business. That's a bummer since it's probably the only way you're going to really find the root cause now. I'd look further afield into the bigger cities for such shops even if a drive is involved. Dell support *might* give you the answers but they also might and probably will just swap stuff out at a high cost and never give you a real root cause beyond some strongly asserted guesses, whatev”
“Hey, So ... I need a sense check guys I've got 72 Dell Precision 5820s about 4 and a half years old, just out of their 4 year warranty. Last week 15 of them failed to POST out of nowhere. Did some RAM reseating and power drains etc got this down to 10 faulty. 3 1 flash code on power button that says faulty motherboard RAM or CPU. That seemed high... Checked the power in the room, confirmed no failed BIOS updates etc. Okay. Book Dell in for motherboard replacement as we stripped one down and”
“There is something to be said about "just paying for what you use" and if you run a business, it's part of your OpEx. If you're reselling and you can maximize the use and you're running a business, sure... buy a B200 but know your operating costs in electricity are about 30k a year for just one and you probably hire someone to babysit it and operationalize it and support it if you're trying to make money from it, otherwise it won't just magically run all year 24x7 g”
“We did this as well with three hosts. Hyper-V was an easier sell as it's more familiar and Data Center edition simplified our windows server licensing. We axed Veeam for another product right after. No hard feelings for Veeam as I still see it as a wonderful product, just found a better fit for our current needs.”
“I buy all our of laptops from Dell Refurbished. Besides the sticker on the bottom saying they're refurbished, you wouldn't know otherwise. For the Dell rugged tablets our production and shipping people use, I just buy them from eBay. They'll get beat to hell and back either way, why spend $1500 on something I can get for $350? They're pretty durable until they get yeeted off the side of a forklift Tokyo drifting through the warehouse and land screen down.”
“It helps, but only up to a point. RAIDZ/mirror covers a single drive dying, but used or recertified drives are just less reliable to start with (already worn, unknown history). So there's a higher chance you hit a failure. So RAID buys you a margin, it doesn't make unreliable drives reliable. And it still isn't a backup.”
“Mr. Richie Rich over here buying 2TB of RAM these days, Dell or not. That would be our annual IT hardware budget. What's the total cost? Like $50,000?”
“I have 8 cluster nodes 4 Prod & 4 DR that I need to take from 500GB to 750GB each. For those of you managing Dell PowerEdge servers, do you normally buy memory directly from Dell, or do you purchase compatible RAM from third-party suppliers for a better price? Does it impact your warranty outside of RAM? I always purchased from Dell in the past, but these days I think the prices are a little crazy. The RAM in my servers is Hynix HMAA8GR7CJR4N-XN. submitted by /u/LoveBirdNibbles [”
“I have had better luck going 2016 to 2025. 2025 seems to handle in place upgrades much better than 2022.”
“I try and avoid in place upgrades on prod servers, too much hassle and your DR plan should include how to build servers from scratch! (Will that software even run on a restore VM, you know which software im talking about!!)”
“ECC in a server is like good knife technique in the kitchen. You will use it eventually the question is, "Do I learn/use it before or after losing a fingertip?" The money saved isn't worth the sleep lost; I know the price of RAM is extortionate at the moment.”
“I have a R710 and a R730 in my house. i like servers and well they are cheap to get and play with. sounds like you got a good deal on them. mine were a bit pricier for well no reason lol. but not like super expensive.”
“If they're not running 24/7 then it should be ok, but again their overall quality isn't going to be that great so if you're using them for backup purposes I would still steer clear.”
“This is the takeaway. For me, I want straightforward support and easy of spare parts. A refurbished marketplace would be good too, for spare units or mid-cycle replacements. And for me, that's Dell, hands down. But that doesn't make their equipment "better" than any others. I just prefer working in their corporate setup when problems do inevitably happen.”
“Their support is HORRIBLE. I've had an issue with my server for months where every friday, it'll drop to read only. Only on friday mornings. It took a month initially to get them to replace the root nvme. That worked for about a month then it started happening again. Now their support will just basically do nothing, their NOC people won't troubleshoot at all even though there's obviously something going on in the cab. I'm just waiting for my contract to be up to run away to a”
“The $75k wouldn't cover the entire virtual environment. Just most of our production servers.”
“Damn thanks for the insight. Even ordering shit off of aliexpress i can expect better service than that. Not that id do that for a business lol. I have ordered some pretty big shit for my homelab from them, and there was a snowstorm here, and i still got up to date answers.”
“SATA, that explains it. M.2 22110 carries a premium because it fits servers that take nothing else, and I was only tracking that form factor, so I was sampling the expensive half of the enterprise SSD market and calling it the market. Running numbers on PM883, PM863a, Intel S4510, Micron 5300 and PM893 at 3.84TB now, and adding the ones with enough listings as separate tracked products. Form factor clearly needs to be part of the product identity rather than an afterthought, same as the RAM and”
“so I was digging through some recent labor numbers and it turns out all these corporate layoffs aren't even about saving money-companies are just reallocating payroll straight into hardware. like take salesforce e.g. their CEO mentioned in a podcast interview that they dropped customer service headcount from 9,000 down to around 5,000 people after letting AI agents handle routine customer chats. when you look at where the cash is actually moving, the shift is pretty wild. statista data shows”
“When that happens, it tells you everything about where drive prices have gone. And a refund at the old price doesn't come close to covering a new one.”
“Haha, thank you! I feel the same looking at it. A year ago drives were half the price. That's exactly why I started charting the history: so the next time there's a real dip in pricing, you can catch it in time.”
“Yeah, the datacenter SSDs got hit just as hard. That's why I added the price history: a "sale" sign means nothing without the context of what it actually used to cost.”
“But only if you live in the US, here in EU we are fucked with prices :( and the shipping from Spd is too expensive”
“Those 10% off articles are exactly what set me off. 10% off of a price that went up 30% isn't a deal - it's a rip-off. That's the whole idea of having the price history. Click any model and you can see if the "deal" is real or just nonsense. Good luck with the SAS drives holding on. I'll see if I can add more new SAS drives to the list.”
“Not Amazon so might be a different beast, but serverpartdeals.com is always highly recommended around here”
“Agree, it's brutal. That's why I started charting the daily prices. When everything's skyrocketed, the only way to catch a real discount is to see the history, not trust some "on sale" sign.”
“Thank you, much appreciated! That was the whole point, to give something back to a community that made me love self hosting.”
“https://preview.redd.it/dowxgcjtt5oh1.png?width=1611&format=png&auto=webp&s=1b12745c98423b6b64550bfe9905ec64b455e80b This was the response by my CEO when I gave him the heads up a 1.2 million dollar invoice approval was headed his way ... there are lots of exec jokes embedded in his response, but he is a brilliant guy in general.... I sent details and of course if was approved but he did go to dell and build out one of the laptops and retail was like 800 bucks more so he was happy...”
“You don't have a choice. Buy garbage, don't buy, or spend more. It pains me to try to order a dell precision/pro max these days.”
“No, it's because it's easier to push 1.5M in contract with Cisco than 150k in salary for a guy. It's the willingness to buy outside the standard circle.”
“Today. Things are not getting cheaper, especially in the USA. We are using up our strategic oil reserve to suppress gas prices - once that well runs dry, everything will cost more.”
“We gave a little proxmox presentation to the other unis in our city before the holidays, most of them need to move away from the dinosaur platforms with jacked pricing.”
“They have, but not this bad and not that hard. And the biggest issue is indeed the "vendor" part. When you go for vmware you know you're paying for a solution and they'll deliver it. Proxmox talks a lot about being pro/open-source and then they can't get the open part actually open, nor the vendor/support part together.”
“i feel like the used market has lost its mind, MOST of the "discounts" you see compared to new save you $50 MAX. Like who is buying used to save $50 on something that costs $300-1,000 Usually when people don't have money the used market relaxes its prices and things get cheaper, but i think because the people selling used stuff are actually rich investors with a "side hustle" that they put hundreds of thousands into they can just sit on their high prices and wait.”
“$15k is a lot. If you are a tech professional, it's reasonable to spend a few thousand to learn about hosting local models. If nothing else, you will have a better understanding of how the machinery works. Spend $5k. But $15k? I guess if you really want to spend $15k, I have an old clunker, I mean SOTA AI Server DeLuxe, that I'm willing to part with for only $14k.”
“there is no reason to buy new. the market is still full of used enterprise minipc's/desktops that are better than any new machine you can build. storage and ram are the main bottlenecks now”
“Oh man I'm in a similar boat lol. I have 32GB of RAM for that same server and it was pretty cheap in 2024 since it's 2666mhz DDR4. I have 16GB in a secondary server that was also dirt cheap. The same sticks I put in my secondary server are now $160, $80 per 8GB. I ended up having to pay for one of those sticks because another server I was given couldn't cut it at 8GB for what was running on it. I knock on wood constantly hoping that pricing will get back to 2023 levels.”
“We needed to buy a new server and the hardware for that was 4x what it had been 9 months ago and had a 3 month lead time. Endpoints I dont deal with but chatting to the other team I think 2x is about right.”
“Your best angle is probably local business backup. Small shops, clinics, dentists most don’t have a backup strategy and would pay $20-30/month just for peace of mind. Much lower bandwidth costs than hosting and the fact you bought your cheap HDD gives you real margin. Worth looking at too is the retention of surveillance footage. Many companies will record, but they will not keep anything longer than a few days. What is your upload speed?”