eRacks Systems Tech Blog
Open Source Experts Since 1999
The Gray Market Got Smarter. Our Answer Hasn’t Changed: New Parts Only.
In 2015 we published a page called Components We Use, prompted by the broker emails that arrive in our inbox four or five times a week: “clean pull” hard drives by the pallet, bank wire only, 90-day warranty if you’re lucky. The message of that page was one sentence: every new eRacks system is built from 100% new, factory-fresh components, full stop.
A decade later the emails still come, but the merchandise has evolved. This week’s version offered current-generation AMD EPYC server processors, “brand new”, at 50 to 70 percent below any plausible new-part price. So we rewrote the page for 2026, and the new material is worth a blog post of its own, because knowing this trick can save you real money and real pain.
The vendor-locked CPU trick
Modern AMD EPYC processors include a security feature called Platform Secure Boot (PSB for short). When a large vendor like Dell, or a cloud data center, first powers a chip in one of their servers, PSB burns one-time fuses inside the processor that bind it permanently to that vendor’s firmware. That chip will now boot only on that vendor’s motherboards. Forever. There is no unlock.
When those servers are decommissioned, the pulled CPUs flow into the gray market, where brokers list them as “brand new” at half price. Buy one for a custom build and you own a very expensive paperweight: it will never POST (pass the power-on self-test) on a Supermicro, ASUS, or any other standard board. The discount is the tell. A price that looks impossible through authorized distribution usually is.
What we do instead
The refreshed page spells out our sourcing practice in full, and it is the same one we have followed since 1999:
- Authorized US distribution only, so every manufacturer warranty passes through to you intact.
- Multi-source price and availability verification before we quote or set a default. When a part goes supply-constrained, as several high-capacity drives have in the current shortage, we mark it subject to availability or move it to quote-only instead of pretending it ships tomorrow.
- Quality brands, qualified by us: Supermicro and ASUS boards, Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC/Ryzen/Threadripper processors, Seagate, WD, and Toshiba drives (CMR only in our NAS lines), Samsung enterprise SSDs, Intel Arc and NVIDIA GPUs, Broadcom/LSI controllers.
- 72-hour burn-in under full load on every system before it ships. A component that fails burn-in gets replaced, and the clock starts over.
None of this is new policy. What is new is the page saying it plainly for 2026, with the vendor-lock mechanics explained, so that when one of those emails lands in YOUR inbox, you know exactly what is being sold.
Read the full page, including the vintage 2015 broker email we preserved for posterity: eracks.com/components-we-use
CPU photographs by smial via Wikimedia Commons, Free Art License.
joe July 6th, 2026
Posted In: Behind the Scenes, News
Tags: AMD PSB, burn-in, components, gray market, hardware, sourcing, transparency, vendor-locked CPU, warranty
What’s your dream developer system?
We at eRacks are designing a new model geared specifically toward the developer, and want to hear from you, the customer, about what you would like to see in the system (please leave detailed comments for this blog post!)
We’ve been batting around a few ideas, both software and hardware related, and would like to share them here for your consideration.
1. IDE, Revision Control System and your Operating System of Choice
Our development model would (of course!) come pre-installed with the best in open source development-related software. Do you have a favorite IDE, or do you prefer to simply invoke your text editor, compiler and makefiles directly? Would you like us to install a revision control system such as CVS, Subversion, Mercurial or Git? What’s your operating system of choice? Are you a fan of Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, OpenSolaris, etc.?
2. What Kind of Developer are you?
While there are usually at least some applications common to most developers, a great deal of the software you’d like to be installed will probably depend significantly on the kind of development you do. Are you a kernel developer? If so, we’ll install the kernel source and headers for you. Are you an applications developer? If so, are there any open source libraries you’d like us to pre-install for you? What about you web developers out there? We could, at your option, install a local web and database server for testing purposes, as well as your scripting engine of choice (PHP, Ruby, Python, Perl, etc.) Do you not fit exactly into any of these categories? Have we missed something? Let us know!
3. Hardware
Do you prefer to develop on a laptop, or do you like to do your programming on a desktop machine? What would you think about having the option of two or more monitors to help you spread out your work, configured to your unique specifications (would you like 2 or more individual displays, or 2 or more monitors tied together into a single virtual display?)
Anything we haven’t mentioned that you’d love to see in a development-specific model? Again, just let us know! Be sure to leave us a comment sharing your thoughts.
james September 18th, 2008
Posted In: Development, New products