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Rose recently posted a guide on how to build your first IT homelab, and not too long ago, trackerpacer shared a video about sourcing homelab equipment. So naturally, this week’s poll is all about one thing: Where do you get the hardware for building your own homelab?

Whether you’re tinkering with a retired server rack in the garage or running a sleek setup with brand-new gear, homelabs come in all shapes, sizes, and budgets. But where do you actually get your parts?

Are you hunting down used enterprise gear on online marketplaces? Repurposing old office hardware? Scoring deals at your favorite retailer? Let us know—and maybe help out someone who’s just getting started.

Oh, and in case you didn’t know, there’s a home-lab section right here in the Community if you want to swap ideas, setups, or stories.

Where do you get most of your homelab hardware?
  • Friends or family hand-me-downs
  • Old hardware from work
  • Online marketplaces
  • Other IT professionals
  • Refurbished/reseller sites
  • Retail
  • Other, tell us below
0 voters

Do you have a unique homelab sourcing strategy or hidden gem to recommend? Reply and tell us where you find the best deals or gear.

Got an idea for our weekly the-voice-of-it or other polls? Let us know below or email us at community@spiceworks.com.

Results

Related:

15 Spice ups
2

I’m cheating, it’s less a Homelab, and more like vintage stuff I try to network together once in a while. So dumpster diving, trash-day sidewalk cruising and thrift stores all qualify for my “lab”. It will be a perfect setup for when civilization collapses. Still looking to network my Sharp PC-1403

9 Spice ups
3

There is always 3 sides to the coin when getting “disposed” hardware for labs…

  1. If not broken, do not dispose.
    We may spend much more time trying to troubleshoot or more $$$ trying to get it to work. Else we may be spending time & $$$ on maybe incompatible parts (eg consumer HDD or RAM) then trying to “make do”

  2. Would the hardware not support the lab OS or hypervisor since it can be quite old

  3. Would there be alternatives to using on-prem hardware like cloud VMs or cloud servers like AWS free tiers or Google Cloud Training VMs etc ??

7 Spice ups
4

I’ve done them all over my IT career, but these days it’s mostly surplus gear from work or online marketplaces, with a smattering of retail. Also another one is hand-me-downs from myself. Once I purchase a new main machine, the old one gets moved into the homelab to run some flavour of Linux or some other system I’m currently playing with.

6 Spice ups
5

Am I odd in that I don’t have a homelab? The last thing I want to do when I finish work is more work…

20 Spice ups
6

I use / repurpose my old gaming rig as I spent enough money building it with a decent cpu / memory and storage in the first place.

Simply maxed out the memory allocation and added more ssd storage.

Then licensed the latest server o/s data centre 2025 and use hyper V for gaming servers as well as a corporate intranet reference model to keep me busy.

Fuz

5 Spice ups
7

It’s only work if you consider it so, but I do understand what you mean.

My lab is from different places, but generally when a business deems it out of warranty/no longer fit for their purpose, i see that as a bargain (typically eBay or the local IT recycling centre).

I don’t buy kit often as my lab is quite stable and runs nested setups.

6 Spice ups
8

“Steal new hardware from work” is missing lol

Nah, mainly old stuff from work. Recently I bought a HP ProDesk SFF with a 8600k, 32 gig ram for 30 bucks

4 Spice ups
9

90% of my lab came from the scrap bin at my previous job, with my stuff now coming from my old contacts there (because having me haul away stuff is cheaper than their disposal service. :joy:)

When I worked in DC, anything out of warranty with a hardware issue immediately went for scrap, so it wasn’t hard to take 2 machines from scrap and get (at least) one working device out of them, which is why my lab mostly runs on old workstations. The location closer to me now is much more frugal, so the hardware I get from them tends to be a bit older and more likely to have multiple problems, but nothing I can’t work with. :wink:

7 Spice ups
10

No homelab for me either. If I want a learning environment, I’ll just spin up old gear at work, isolated from everything else. When I go home, I do work, but I’m in my garden, in the kitchen, or working on an old truck. I used to do a lot of side IT work, but I’ve mostly gotten away from that because 8 hours a day of IT is plenty for me. :slight_smile:

12 Spice ups
11

Not really a “homelab” per se, but I get most of my equipment from work. We replace servers about every 5 years and most of them are in perfect operating condition at that point, and since I run linux in my house, perfect for a linux server. I can’t take HDDs, so I have to spend that money, but their pretty cheap right now so no big deal.

7 Spice ups
12

I am collecting for a low-fi studio for years.
an old atari st, old mac, some not quite so old pcs (with ubuntu studio), two real echolettes, an old 16 channel mixer to bring it together…

this winter I will plug it all together and see what still works :slight_smile:

9 Spice ups
13

Glad I’m in good company. I definitely have a test lab at work, but if I’m home and off the clock, I’m doing things outside of IT. In fact, my study went so unused for so long, my SO pretty much moved in and took it over when he got his new WFH gig.

7 Spice ups
14

right? i hate working with technology all day why come home and do more! i do have a home server just for plex and i have couple vm’s running that but i do NOT tinker just set it up and was happy

7 Spice ups
15

I haven’t had an actual home lab since my kid was born, and when we moved back in '21, I took the opportunity to obsolete the hardware since it was just sitting in a powered-off pile :frowning:

3 Spice ups
16

I’ve acquired my home lab equipment from a variety of sources. I have some stuff we retired at work, I’ve bought refurbished and new, and I’ve reused some stuff I’ve been asked by clients to recycle. I am lucky in that my professional life is also my hobby. Basically, I get paid to play!

6 Spice ups
17

I don’t have one anymore. I decided to downsize as I’m getting near retirement. And my spouse and I moved into a smaller home, so no place for a lab anyway.

7 Spice ups
18

90% old hardware from work, 10% buying new because I need something specific fast. This last part was much easier before Fry’s in Austin closed.

8 Spice ups
19

My current home lab machine is a hand me down VM host, my son’s lab is a mix of Oregon State University surplus store and eBay acquisitions.
Most of our personal laptops are off lease ThinkPads from eBay, although my son has gotten bougie and currently uses a small Panasonic laptop he imported from Japan

5 Spice ups
20

When I did a home lab, I had old equipment that I repurposed from different places that I’d worked. Some equipment I found and fixed (if easy) and made into something good, but lately my biggest issue is how do I afford the Electric to Run all this. Most of the machines would need to run 24/7 and have a decent UPS, and that’s something I don’t have the budget for so I tend to be without a lab.

4 Spice ups