Guides
Enterprise IT Hardware Buying Guides
These guides explain how enterprise IT hardware is actually traded by the lot, rather than how a single unit is bought at retail. They are written for the person with forty servers in a room, three hundred drives on a pallet, or a purchase order to place against a specification they did not write. Each one answers a question that comes up before a price is worth discussing: what a condition grade really covers, what belongs on a manifest, which drive interface a backplane will accept, why a memory lot has to be sorted before it is worth anything, and what actually sets the number on a valuation. Nothing here is a specification sheet reprinted. Every guide is written from the questions GTR Supply is asked on the desk, and each one is meant to be useful even if you never buy or sell anything here.
The guides
7 guides and a glossary.
Each one answers a question that comes up before a price is worth discussing, and each one is written to be useful whether or not you ever trade anything with us.
Condition Grades Explained: Grade A vs Grade B
What a condition grade covers, what it cannot cover, and why the same letter means two different things at two suppliers.
What Is a Hardware Lot Manifest?
The document that lets you price a mixed lot line by line instead of guessing at an average.
What to Check When Buying Used Enterprise Drives
How much life is spent, has it begun failing, and can you verify it. In that order, before price.
Drive Interfaces Explained for Bulk Buyers
Start at the backplane, not at the drive. What your controller accepts is the question that costs money.
Server Memory Explained: RDIMM, LRDIMM and Rank
Why four things have to match before a board will post, and how a mixed memory lot gets sorted into value.
How to Sell a Decommissioned Hardware Lot
The method: what a buyer prices, how to write the list, and the habit that costs sellers the most.
How a Used Hardware Valuation Works
The four things that set a number, why no price list exists, and what indicative really means.
IT Hardware Trading Glossary
Every term this site and this trade uses, defined properly and grouped by theme, on one page. 66 terms, grouped by theme.
Who these guides are for
Two readers, and the guides serve both without pretending they are the same person.
The first is buying. You have a requirement, a budget and a specification that came from somewhere else, and what you need is enough understanding to tell whether a lot in front of you is the thing you asked for. The grading, manifest, drive interface and memory guides are written for you, and each of them is built around the mistake that costs the most money rather than around the definition that is easiest to write.
The second is selling. You have a room, a shelf or a pallet, and you need to know what a buyer is going to ask for and what will happen to the number if you get it wrong. The selling and valuation guides are written for you.
The glossary serves both. It defines the words used across this site and across the trade, including several that are used constantly and defined almost nowhere.
Why there are no prices in any of them
Because a published price would be wrong for most of the lots it was read against, and a wrong price wastes more of your time than no price does.
Enterprise hardware is priced against the exact item, its condition, its completeness, the quantity and what is moving at the time. Two pallets of drives with the same headline capacity can be different propositions once the interface, the sector format and the test data are known. Two servers with the same model badge can differ several times over in value on processor and memory configuration alone. A number published against a category name cannot carry any of that.
What these guides do instead is teach you what to write down, so the number you get back is a real one rather than a range hedged against everything the sender left out. Send a specification and a quantity and pricing normally comes back the same business day.
Where to start
If you have never bought a lot before, start with condition grades and then read the manifest guide. Those two together cover the vocabulary that everything else in this trade is written in, and they are the two documents a supplier will hand you when the conversation gets serious.
If you are buying drives specifically, read the guide on what to check when buying used enterprise drives before you read anything about price. It is the category where the difference between a good lot and a bad one is invisible from the outside and completely visible in the test data.
If you are selling, read how a valuation works first and the selling guide second. The first tells you what a buyer is doing with your list, the second tells you how to write the list so the number comes back quickly.
If you only need a word defined, the glossary is one page and it is quicker.
The words that cause the most trouble
A small number of terms do most of the damage in this trade, and they do it because they sound precise and are not.
Grade A and Grade B lead the list. There is no body that defines them and no penalty for using them loosely, so two suppliers quoting the same letter may not be quoting the same thing at all. Tested, refurbished and used are similarly elastic, and each describes a process rather than a measured result.
Some terms mislead by sounding like something they are not. Nearline SAS is a capacity drive rather than a performance one. A manifest is not a packing list. A U.2 bay and a 2.5 inch bay are not the same requirement even though the drive fits both.
And some are simply used constantly and defined nowhere, tested pulls being the clearest case.
All of them are collected on one glossary page with proper definitions, grouped by theme rather than alphabetically, because these words are learned in clusters.
Common questions
About these guides.
Are these guides about buying or about selling?
Both, and each guide says which side it is written from rather than trying to serve two readers in one sentence.
The grading, manifest, drive interface, drive checking and memory guides are written for a buyer. They are about reading a lot correctly before you commit to it, because the errors that hurt in this trade are specification errors rather than price errors. A pallet bought at a good number that will not fit your backplane is a bad purchase at any price.
The selling guide and the valuation guide are written for a seller, and they cover what a buyer is actually pricing and how to describe a lot so the number comes back quickly.
The glossary serves both, because the same words appear on both sides of the desk and mean the same thing in each direction.
GTR Supply buys and sells, which is why these guides can be written from both sides honestly.
Why does this site not publish prices?
Because the price of a lot is set by things a published figure cannot carry, and quoting a number against a category name would mislead more people than it helped.
The specification does most of the work. Two processors from the same family and socket can differ several times over in value on core count alone. Two drives that both read the same capacity on the sticker can be different items once interface generation and endurance class are known. Condition, completeness and quantity move it again, and availability in some categories changes week to week.
So pricing is quoted against live stock and the exact specification instead. Send a part number, a specification or a quantity and pricing and availability normally come back the same business day.
On the buying side the same logic applies in reverse. A valuation is built against your list rather than against a rate card.
Do I need to understand any of this to buy or sell a lot?
No. You can send a list and a quantity and get a number back without reading a word of it, and plenty of people do exactly that.
These guides exist because the questions in them are the ones that come up anyway, usually halfway through a transaction and usually at the least convenient moment. Knowing what a grade covers before the pallet arrives is cheaper than working it out afterwards. Knowing which sector format your array is running on is cheaper than discovering it when the rebuild refuses to start.
On the selling side the payoff is faster. Ten minutes spent understanding what a buyer is pricing usually turns a vague list into a specific one, and a specific list gets a real number instead of a range.
If you would rather just ask, ask. You will get a straight answer, including where the answer is that we are not the right party for it.
Tell us what you are looking for.
Send a part number, a specification or a quantity. Pricing and availability normally come back the same business day.
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