What to do with old PC hardware (that still works)

Upgrading My Main PC

Beginning 2025. I upgraded my main PC running Arch Linux. The MB, CPU, GPU and RAM were all over ten years old. They still worked perfectly, but I wanted something new and more powerful

So I bought some top-notch, new and up-to-date components: CPU, GPU, MB and RAM. It was a bit expensive, but I thought, “No worries, I’ll just sell the old hardware and recoup some cash.”

Hah! What a wally I was. Nobody wanted my ten-year-old hardware, even though it still worked flawlessly. And being a tight git, I wasn’t about to just give it away 🤣.

The Idea of a Home Server

For a while, I'd been thinking about moving away from Google services and building a home server for storage, backups and learn more.

So I bought a new PC case and power supply (I had reused the old ones for my Arch build). I added:

The old motherboard, CPU, GPU, and RAM.
A small SSD for the operating system.
A larger SSD for software (that I had lying around).
An IronWolf HDD for backups (A top-of-the-range HDD)

Yes, an HDD, not an SSD. They’re still perfectly fine for backups and still cheap. (On my Arch PC, I still use two HDDs for backups)

Reborn as a Debian Server

Once the hardware was in place, I installed Debian in server mode, no desktop environment, just SSH access and then began the fun and slightly painful journey of setting up Docker containers. (That’s a story for another post — it’s complicated but worth it!)

So far, I’ve got:

Nextcloud (for file syncing and replacing Google Photos)
Home Assistant (for smart home automation)
WordPress (for my blog)
Nginx Proxy Manager (to manage all the traffic)

So now I have

I’ve ended up with two machines:

My main Arch Linux PC with brand-new, up-to-date hardware.
A server in a new case and PSU built from my old parts, working beautifully.

Google Photos is now empty, since I’ve moved everything to Nextcloud. All my notes live in Nextcloud, I have hundreds, and Joplin syncs perfectly with it.

The Moral of the Story
So what did I learn?

Don’t expect to sell old hardware, even if it still works perfectly. Nobody wants a 10+ year-old CPU, RAM, MB or GPU
Don’t throw them out either! Reuse them:

A home server (storage, media, backups).
A learning machine for Linux or Docker.

In my case, the best option was to reuse my old parts for a server (I already have a tiny PC that I use for installing different flavours of Linux to learn from). So now, instead of sitting on a shelf collecting dust, it's sitting in a closet running my new server. Hence, my post title What to do with old PC hardware that still works