What do you all do with your old hard drives?

[Zepher]

As I was putting the parts into my new case the other day I decided not to put in 3 of the 9 drives I had in there originally since 1 was IDE and the other 2 were only 250GB each.
I labeled the two 250's and put them into anti-static bags. The IDE was put into an external USB box so that I could copy the contents to the new 2TB I added into the machine, and then put that into an anti-static bag and stacked it on the other drives.

Currently there are 5 drives on my desk, 4 in my small drawer, 4 in another drawer, and another 4 on a shelf on the side of my TV stand (all 4 are dead, 3 of them are 10K rpm SCSI drives that you could probably cook on, almost burnt my fingers when I touched them after I got them).

I might see if I can my hands on the foam shipping cartons that they use to ship 10 drives so that I can easily store the working ones.

 

[mickey megabyte]

i sort of abide by the philosophy that the old small ones are eventually going to fail, so i give them away, letting the recipient know that it's an old drive and not to trust it 100%

useful ones i stick in my whs box for backup purposes - the smallest one is currently 80 gigs, which is only 1/25th of the size of my latest external drive, so i'll probably get rid of it when i find the time to transfer the data...

or i'll offload stuff onto them now and then to free up some space on my every day drives if needs be...

slightly off-topic, i can always find a use for small thumb drives or sd cards - you can put a whole bootable os on them, even the tiny ones such as 256 megs. slitaz and puppy linux ftw!

 

[johnwillyums]

Apparently the only way to truly render them unreadable/unrecoverable is to physically smash them to pieces with a sledge hammer. Sounds quite good fun

 

[SIW2]

LOL - not really John - don't believe everything you see on csi miami.

 

[z3r010]

I've still got every single one of mine.

 

[Ciara]

When I installed my two Caviar Black 500s the two I removed I put in the bottom of my wardrobe

 

[TVeblen]

Hammers! Oh yeah! The disks are also good for skeet!

Most good old hard drives I test, wipe, format and they go into a large cardboard box along with a lot of other computer parts. If I need one for a cheap build they are there.

When the box is getting full I retire the older, smaller drives. If they were one of mine I open the case, remove the disk, and recycle the body. Someone else's drive, I just recycle the whole thing.

The disks have many uses. Coasters, mobiles, shims, targets (bulls-eye = another shot!). They are actually not very good for skeet - they fly too erratically.

I also have an opened 540mb drive on my wall. It is art.

 

[SledgeDG]

Apparently the only way to truly render them unreadable/unrecoverable is to physically smash them to pieces with a sledge hammer. Sounds quite good fun

All it really takes is a Torx 6 or 8 driver to open the drive outside a clean room and you could consider it smashed.
one of my first ones (a 10 MB IBM which weight about 5 lbs sit's on my desk at work taken apart as a demo object)
Old drives with reasonable amount of space 80 GB+ usually become hand-me-downs for the rest of my family or the 200GB+ ones go into enclosures as external mass storage devices.
It's quite funny to connect one of those just to find your old favorites like Doom 1 and 2 or old Duke Nukem installations as well as some old CD rips.

 

[Fayla]

If it's broken I smash and bash it up real good, then float it in boiling hot water for a while (hard drive alacarte )

If it is just being replaced for a newer, larger size then I put into a anti static bag and store it away.

 

[johnwillyums]

LOL - not really John - don't believe everything you see on csi miami.

I just really wanna smash one up, ok? Nothing wrong with that:drool:

 

[DarkXeno]

Well I tend to use hardware until its good and dead, with that being said I have a total of ten machines all running in my house. From my new build to my P-Pro 90mhz. As i upgrade newer machines i send the drives down the line, once dead I then save them up and take them to the range for some fun since over the life time of these drives software has taken my hair so I get revenge on the softwares home. Sad thing is I still have a 8 gig Maxtor running strong with no signs of giving up.

 

[mr pc]

I'm building a robot

 

[DarkXeno]

I'm building a robot

I for one welcome our new Hard Drive Robot Overlords.

 

[patio]

I've still got every single one of mine.

Ditto...

 

[Joan Archer]

Well the only one I have at present is waiting for a new enclosure so hubby can use it for backup, it was taken out of his XP machine so still has the OS and his programs installed, it's only an 80GB but plenty big enough for his needs when I can get it to work.

I have no idea what happened to the others, they along with their cases just went but I can't for the live of me remember where to, one was a Windows 98 machine and the other was WinME.

 

[noobvious]

LOL - not really John - don't believe everything you see on csi miami.

I just really wanna smash one up, ok? Nothing wrong with that:drool:

That does sound quite fun!

 

[Devux]

Still have every hard drive and flash drive I've ever owned. And they all still work. Oldest HDD being a 4GB Big Foot TX, 5.25 form factor 4000RPM drive, originally out of a windows 98 box (Yes I'm young). Oldest flash drive being a 32MB, which when I got it, was astronomically large ~compared to a floppy disk~