The question is not, how old something is.
The right point is, as long as it works and you or somebody else can do something useful with it, it's not obsolete.
Which involes the quest for what useful things can be done with it.
If one of both points is not given then it's junk, no matter how old or young it is.
There are many other examples, but one was
my NAS: Its over twenty years old AMD Phenom II X4 980 finally became too slow ("old") for my desktop usage. But it does more than just a sufficient job for several years being my trustworthy NAS.
I also have three thirteen old HP EliteDesk G1 Towers in the attic. Such hardware to have is very good for some hardcore testing purposes, like doing dirty things with brute force without the need my real machines even remotely get in touch with. I can recklessly bang as hard as I want in any way on them, because it doesn't matter when one of those things is gone. A hardware separated sandbox. Nice to have.
Or perhaps, like in
Aknot's recent example, one day some kid may ask to get into computers. You can give such hardware without bothering what's done with it. It has no real monetary value anymore, but it works. At least for learning the important basics, like the lesson of what's it like when it's suddenly broken, before you give access to an expensive machine.
They are cheap for a reason.
I could actually hear the noise of the hard drives if I listened carefully at nighttime, but it was very quiet. I had to vacuum the dust off the air filter grilles inside the front panel a few times though, and that angled one at the back on the top. I loved the silicone dampened suspension for mounting hard drives. Every edge was rolled. It was a real quality job. It's a real shame they've stopped making that one.
