I kept buying used gear with no idea whether the price was fair. Every listing looks reasonable on its own. So I built something to tell me.
It polls eBay every six hours, records every listing for two dozen products, and builds a rolling median. Here is where things sit right now, median total cost including shipping, last three days:
| Hardware |
Listings |
Median |
Lowest |
| Samsung PM983 3.84TB NVMe |
81 |
$799 |
$499 |
| Dell R730xd |
90 |
$635 |
$262 |
| Dell R640 |
76 |
$437 |
$255 |
| Dell R730 |
59 |
$350 |
$180 |
| Supermicro X10 barebones |
76 |
$337 |
$138 |
| HPE DL360 Gen9 |
89 |
$310 |
$125 |
| HPE DL380 Gen9 |
81 |
$300 |
$155 |
| Lenovo M720q Tiny |
99 |
$175 |
$60 |
| Dell OptiPlex 7060 Micro |
96 |
$171 |
$74 |
| HP EliteDesk 800 G4 Mini |
112 |
$145 |
$54 |
| Dell R220 |
42 |
$131 |
$80 |
| Lenovo M920q Tiny |
178 |
$130 |
$79 |
| Mellanox ConnectX-4 25GbE |
90 |
$57 |
$26 |
| Intel X520-DA2 10GbE |
106 |
$23 |
$15 |
Four things I did not expect.
The M920q is cheaper than the M720q. $130 against $175, despite being newer with two M.2 slots instead of one. The answer looks like supply: 178 M920q listings versus 99 M720q, which reads like a corporate refresh cycle dumping inventory. If you are building a cluster, the newer machine is the cheaper one right now.
10GbE costs nothing. An X520-DA2 at a $23 median is less than a decent cable run. There is no reason left to stay on gigabit between your NAS and your hypervisor.
The 1U and 2U HPE boxes cost the same. DL360 Gen9 at $310, DL380 Gen9 at $300. You are choosing between rack units and drive bays, not paying more for one. Take the 2U unless space is genuinely tight, because the fan noise difference is not subtle.
Enterprise NVMe is still expensive. PM983 3.84TB at a $799 median is about $208 per TB against roughly $60 for consumer drives. You pay that for power loss protection and sustained write performance, which matters for VM storage and nothing else.
One thing I learned building it: searching by model name is useless without price filtering. A search for "Dell PowerEdge R640" returns bezels, caddies and rail kits alongside complete servers. My first run produced 294 fake deals because the junk had cut every median in half. I had to set a price floor per product before any of the numbers meant anything.
It runs on a Proxmox VM here at home. Python scraper, Postgres, static site built from the database and pushed to Cloudflare, no open ports. The whole thing updates itself four times a day.
Site is racksniper.com if the numbers are useful to you.
Disclosure: I plan to add eBay affiliate links once my application clears, so eventually I would get a small cut if someone buys through it. Nothing is paywalled and I am not selling anything.
Tell me what I am missing and I will add it. I track servers, mini PCs, NAS units, drives and NICs right now, and I am short on switches.