Arrays, shelves, controllers and drives in bulk. Storage is the line finance writes down to zero fastest and the line that most often turns out to be worth the most — enterprise drives hold value long after the refresh cycle says they shouldn't.
| Category | Typical |
|---|---|
| NetApp | FAS & AFF controllers, DS / NS disk shelves |
| Dell EMC | Unity, VNX, PowerVault MD / ME, Isilon nodes, PowerStore |
| HPE | MSA, Nimble, 3PAR / Primera, D-series shelves |
| Pure Storage | FlashArray //M, //X shelves and controllers |
| Drives, in bulk | SAS / SATA / NVMe SSDs and HDDs — enterprise only, any quantity |
| HBAs & fabric | Controllers, FC switches, transceivers, cables |
Two reasons. First, enterprise drives are built for duty cycles that outlast the array they shipped in, so a shelf full of 3.84TB SAS SSDs is still perfectly good hardware when the controller in front of it is out of support. Second, the people who run these platforms need spares for kit that's no longer sold — and a discontinued shelf that keeps a production array alive is worth considerably more than its weight.
That's why the shelves matter as much as the heads, and why we'd rather take the whole array than cherry-pick it.
Every data-bearing device is sanitised with the method its media actually requires — a firmware-level SANITIZE or crypto-erase for flash, verified overwrite or degauss for spinning disks. Multi-pass overwrite on an SSD is a comfort blanket, not a sanitisation method: the controller's wear-levelling and over-provisioned blocks sit outside the addressable range, so data survives in places a host-level wipe never reaches.
Anything that won't verify clean doesn't get resold — it gets destroyed, and the destruction is recorded on the same certificate.
Model of the array and shelves, drive count, drive capacity and interface, and whether controllers are included. Photos of the labels are genuinely faster than a spreadsheet for storage — the model and part numbers are usually printed on the bezel.
Send the model and the drive count. You'll have a number inside a working day.
Get my free valuation →