Extra Hard Drives, What do you do with them?

Hey guys, I'm trying to purge all the computer junk I have. I'm throwing a lot of stuff away. But I have a bunch of extra hard drives that We're working when they went into a box. An old SSD (Pre-Trim), 160GB, 250GB, 1TB 5400RPM, ect.

What do you guys do with your extra drives? I feel guilty jush crushing them. Any suggestions? Thanks!

Dan

 

Take them apart and make pretty wall decorations? For me, it's either that or toss them in a box to never be thought about again. I won't sell drives that have had my personal data on them.

 

Hard drives contain magnets that can be very useful. You can also use the platters for coasters or for skeet shooting targets. And if you collected enough of the read/write heads, you could probably make them into some sort of comb. The internals of dead SSDs aren't very useful, but you can use the casing to store mints.

 

??? some left field ideas there! How many $000's worth of hard drives would that be to make a comb made for fractions of a cent by the billions in Chinese factories. Kind of like a top fuel or F1 engine made into a coffee table.

OP you'd be surprised, you may get $50 out of the lot of them on a trading forum or fleabay, one man's trash another's treasure. A few years back I upgraded a netbook with a very old Samsung RBX in a grab bag of stuff I acquired, seq r/w was no better than the glacial 5400rpm it replaced at ~80Mb/s but it did load stuff faster and was silent. (Double wipe them to remove all trace of your state secrets and you'll be ok)

The 1tb is a useful off-net portable backup drive with only a $10 external USB case - or a slow portable drive - or a useful poor-man's-NAS if your wireless router has a USB-hosting capability

The magnets are useful, glue to the bottom of a glass bowl and they are a great screw holder, I always keep a magnet around for finding lost screws in carpet

 

I just backup home videos and photos and shelve them. Otherwise throw a bunch of movies on them and give them to computer illiterate family and friends.

 

If the old SSD is still working, depending on its capacity, you could use it as a scratch disk for example. The other hard drives, if the 1 TB isn't too old, it would be a good backup drive. The smaller capacity HDDs, I'd send to recycling.

 

If I stop using a drive, I sell it or give to friends/relatives. Why waste a good product?

 

I wouldn't wish some older drives like a 160 GB HDD on anyone for example. Heck, I couldn't see a purpose to the 320 GB 5.4K RPM drive that came in an older laptop either. Those just get wiped and sent to be disposed of properly.

Any decently sized and recent drive will find a purpose if it can like the 7K750 that is now sitting in my PS4 in lieu its original 500GB 5.4K RPM drive.

 

I simply turn my extra drives into externals for backups and exchanging large amounts of data around. Or reused in future computer building/modifying projects.

 

@tijo even bad drives can be sold - people buy those for parts in attempt to recover valuable data from another old drive of same model; and of course if the drive is good, someone will buy it - al long as the price is right. Putting a drive (or other tech equipment) on sale at local private ads website is a matter of 5 minutes, yet can save other person in a dire situation, or at least earn you some $$$.

 

All of those cardboard boxes are full of 3.5" and 2.5" drives. Note the drilled holes in them...

Computers with no sensitive data are dbanned as usual before sending them to the refurbing company.

 

I would have so much fun tearing those apart and getting the magents

 

I know places where they saw them in half after wiping them. Gotta make sure no one gets to that data.

 

Sawing them in half doesn't solve than, neither does drilling a whole through the disk either.

Dban however comes extremely close.

Either way, physically destroying the drive is the safest solution

 

I used to work in a E-waste recycling centre. 90% of the people who work there, won't know or care the content of the HDD's. They get pulled apart, Magnets are gold there, they get used everywhere even as a bypass on the bailing machine for when that stuffs up.

The odd 10% of people who see something of value, don't want your data, or are only looking for porn or a cheap upgrade, but the porn is drying up on HDD's thanks to streaming services. Now they try and boot old phones for home made content but security on phones are getting harder to crack.

Note however, that if said staff members got caught trying to pocket items, they got fired quick as the company saves better equipment to make refurbished computers for disadvantaged homes.

Surprisingly there is quite a bit of money to be made when you bulk recycle E-waste, from rare metals to scrap metal, old x-rays, disposed film or slides.

There was a good youtube vid from Linus Tech Tips that showed all the materials that went into a CPU. Interesting stuff.

As said above, Dban before selling or disposing for piece of mind.

 

That is why I mentioned they wipe them, as in they overwrite random data over whatever was there before sawing them. I have no clue if they use DBAN or something else, I never asked.

 

Raids for days

 

Just note that RAID != backup