Haha everybody (including me) is so jelly of your dumpster room
It might be surprising to see 36 GB enterprise grade machines tossed, but when you work at large companies who do IT or have a large IT unit you quickly understand how this happens. Everything is about having precise procedures and responsibilities. Some team is responsible for the high level software service, another team is in charge of networking, system administration and hardware. The only way to achieve certain reliability is to have maintenance contracts with the manufacturer. With Dell, HP or IBM when a machine has a hardware fault, they send you a replacement board or a technician within 24 hours, no questions asked. Those contracts usually run for 2 or 3 years. After that the renewal of the contract might be more expensive than buying a new machine, which is understandable because the manufacturers want to get rid of the old stuff.
It's as simple as that, serious companies don't run production services on hardware without maintenance contracts. Some of them recycle those machines for testing or some internal services that have no SLA, but the hardware always ends up unused, occupying space with everybody just wanting to get rid of it. I even saw this happening for > 20k hardware, the only difference is that people hesitate longer before tossing it, so it can wait five or ten year in some storage room before it looses all of its value.
On the practical side, the machines you got just scream for becoming storage servers :
- CPUs are entry-level but they have pretty low idle power consumption
- the CPUs are fanless, an arbitrary level of silence can be achieved by adding more low speed fans
- they have ECC RAM, this is absolutely critical for any serious storage service
So if you don't know where to store your raw video footage, don't hesitate to populate those with big HDDs and some fancy filesystem like ZFS !
Edit : Also I think that in your video, you overestimate the reliability of those machines. As I explained they all run under maintenance contracts and every critical machine will have a spare running aside or stored somewhere nearby. It might be better in some respects than average consumer stuff, but you see servers fail all the time. Sysadmins won't cry all over the web about how bad their motherboard is, they'll just call and get a replacement with no fuss.