Folding Forum

Would it be possible for someone to send hardware to support the PG instead of money?
I'm sure we all have spare hardware items we can't/don't use anymore. So, why leave them inactive?
Ideally, the PG could issue, let's say, once a month a list with their needs in hardware and whoever sees in that list an item he owns that doesn't need anymore he may donate it.

Could we elaborate some more on this?

Used hardware could be problematic to support. Reliability might be questioned. New or unused hardware might be necessary for such a program.

Sell the used hardware on eBay, and then donate the funds.

That is correct, but I'm not talking only about server class hardware or used items. Donors could send desktop hardware as well, to be used in ordinary machines that do every day's paperwork. Or the donated items could be stored by the PG as spare. There are a lot of circumstances. I personally bought some ECC memory i never used in the end and it's brand new in it's box (sealed). I tried to sell it but i couldn't (just to give an example )

In order to have some systematic sysadmin of our servers, we try to keep things as uniform as possible. Also, old hardware has a way of breaking, and maintaining service contracts on them can be expensive. So, while donations of hardware is a very generous gesture, 7im's suggestion of selling the hardware and then donating the funds would be much, much more practical for us and in most cases, old servers aren't useful.