Some of you may have heard Toys R Us is going out of business, at least here in the U.S.A. After catching wind that they were selling IT equipment, my curiosity got the better of me and I went to check out what was going on.

First Blood

I went to a couple Toys R Us (TRU) in my area around Orlando, FL. All of them were selling the exact same hardware (configurations may vary). At the time of writing, some of that equipment included.

APC 1000VA UPS ($50)
Cisco 2960-S ($20)
Cisco Meraki MS220-8P ($20)
Lexmark Printers ($300)
Dell OptiPlex (unknown)
Dell R330's ($800)
Two Way Radios ($50 each)
Surveillance Cameras (unknown)
Server Rack (unknown)
Patch Panels (unknown)
and much more

I was specifically targeting the Dell R330's, however at $800 USD, I was immediately turned off. Brand new Dell R330's could be had for about $1000-$1400 depending on the configuration you selected so paying $800 just didn't seem worth it. The store manager at the time said the Liquidator would give me a call to negotiate on prices when he/she had a chance, but at this point I was a bit down. Before leaving I took pictures of the Service Tags that Dell gives to each of it's systems. This is important because I would need this to look up what the Dell R330's configurations were, when they were initially shipped to TRU. Defeated, I left the store with nothing but my slightly more than half way full wallet.

The amount of IT equipment they were selling was a bit underwhelming but it was nice to get a glimpse of some of the things going on behind closed doors. Here are some photos I snapped.

Part Deux

Returning to the interwebs, I saw a post on Reddit where a person claimed they had successfully negotiated the price of a Dell R330 down to $550. Willing to push my luck and return to the store to attempt haggle the TRU manager for the equipment, I arrived with a bit more knowledge and courage. I learned that the two Dell R330's had slightly different configurations, so I wanted to go in and but the higher end model for $500 and leave the lower end one to it's fate. There wasn't much of difference between the two but below is essentially the gist of the configurations.

Intel Xeon E3-1230 v5 3.4GHz, 8M cache, 4C/8T, turbo (80W)
Single Hot Plug Power Supply 350W
Dual 300GB 15K SAS drives
16GB DDR4 RAM (probably $200 by itself)
iDRAC 8 Enterprise (retails for $295)
Server 2012 R2 Datacenter
H330 RAID controller
4 3.5 inch Hot Swap drive bays
no rails

The lower end model has these differences

Server 2012 R2 Standard
8GB DDR4 RAM
iDRAC 8 Standard

I walked into the store, demanded to see the manager, and politely asked if any equipment had sold yet. Much to my surprise, it had not, only 1 switch. I was incredibly excited at this point. The manager (Matt) escorted me to the server room and asked which servers or equipment I wanted. I told him wanted the higher end server for $500, he said the lowest he could go was 20% off ($640) of the $800 asking price. I said no thanks, it isn't worth it. He then proceeded to call the Liquidator and negotiate on my behalf, after a tossing numbers back and forth, we finally settled on $475 for the "low end" Dell and $550 for the "high end" R330. Well damn.... I only wanted 1 not both, ugh. So I bought both because I fell like it was a good deal and I could probably sell the second for around $600.

After we finally agreed on price, I paid and was given a receipt and my equipment was marked "Sold". I was told that the possible earliest I could pick them up was June 30th and that I would receive a call when I officially could. Now we wait...

Here is a GIF of the Server Room.

Toys R Us Successful Server Hunt!

Finale

On Saturday June 30th, I was finally able to pick up both Dell R330 servers. They first told me to show up at 6:30AM to pick them up then called me the day before to tell me 2:00PM instead. I showed up about 15 minutes by mistake and they made me wait outside until 2:00PM. No big deal I guess, aside from the heat. Well, I had to wait 5 hours for them to be "wiped" before they finally let me de-rack them.

So what did I get out of all of this? Well I walked away with:

2 Dell R330's ($1025 total)
2 Rack mountable Shelves (free)
1 Patch Panel (free)
1 Cable Management Arm (free)
1 Trendnet KVM (free)
Power Cables and other cables (free)
Tons of Velcro Straps (free)

While some of the items are a bonus the stuff I truly only care about are the servers, now that I have had an opportunity to crack em open and see what they have I can now share with you what was in them.

Dell R330 1

1 350w Platinum PSU
iDRAC 8 Enterprise
Front Bezel
2 300GB 15K RPM SAS Drives
Perc H330
32GBs of DDR4 ECC RAM
Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacenter
Dell ProPlus Support plan expires 2022
no rails
on-Board USB 3.0
Add in SD Card reader
empty TPM (Trusted Platform Module) slot

Dell R330 2

1 350w Platinum PSU
iDRAC 8 Enterprise
Front Bezel
2 300GB 15K RPM SAS Drives
Perc H330
32GBs of DDR4 ECC RAM
Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard
Dell ProPlus Support plan expires 2022
no rails
on-Board USB 3.0
Add in SD Card reader
empty TPM (Trusted Platform Module) slot

Originally when I looked up the specs on Dells Support page, they only had 16GB's of RAM each. So I was pretty happy to see 32GB's. I feel like I got a good haul even though others probably have done better.