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What To Do With Old USB Keys, Low-Capacity Hard Drives?
MessedRocker writes "I have at least a few USB flash drives around that I haven't needed since I got my 16GB flash drive, a 40GB external hard drive which I haven't needed since I upgraded to 500GB, and a couple of SATA hard drives I have pulled out of laptops which are either as large or smaller than the one I have in my laptop now. Furthermore, I don't really know anyone who needs any hard drives or flash drives. What should I do with my small, obsolete storage devices?"
FreeGeek.
Advice: on VPS providers
With the higher energy consumptions of older drives it's just more economical to recycle.
Older flash drives will be unreliable soon.
So I suggest the obvious: just recycle or find someone locally, who wants the stuff (poor student etc...) But do not send to Africa because I feel it's just shifting the problem and the cost of shipping is not worth it for whoever does it.
Putting a live XP or Linux distribution onto it makes it a fine rescue disk.
Give 'em to your church.
Use them for backups of small things.
Add them to the internal usb ports on your pc or pci card for some hidden always-available storage.
S
Go back in time to 1960 and sell them for several hundred million each.
Or just do
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/disk bs=1k
It hasn't been successfully recovered from, to my knowledge
Check out my sysadmin blog!
A) Install USB linux on one of them. They come in handy when repairing computers. B) Pass them to close friends, or colleagues at work, they'll give it to their children. C) Give it to your neighbor.
sdelete -z works by creating random-filled temporary files on a drive until all space is filled, then it deletes the temporary files. The concept should work equally well on a flash drive.
John
It hasn't been successfully recovered from, to my knowledge
It can't be, on any drive made this century and most drives from the last decade of the previous one. If you've got confidential data stored on old drives that use MFM recording (not necessarily an MFM interface) then you might need to worry.
Why are you relying on sdelete instead of something like DBAN?
USB keys can be quite useful, even in small - think backup (PGP, SSH, etc) keyring, a convenient way of putting anti-malware software onto an infected computer that has been pulled off the network, etc. Despite having several multi-gigabyte flash drives, I keep a 32 meg drive around just for copying MBAM and friends onto infected machines for doing cleanups.
I bought this nice cable for 15$ that allows you to plug any SATA or ATA IDE harddrive to a USB port. Basically, any HD becomes a portable USB drive!
I use it for backups or large data transfers that would split on multiple DVDs. Best 15$ I ever spent.
Free Geek organizations (I can't speak for others) have a comittment to destroying data on donated drives before they go out again. If you don't want to (or are not allowed to) trust that, then you can download a copy of DBAN and nuke your drives for a few hours (or days) before you donate them.
For most civilian uses, 'dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdX' is sufficient (with today's drive density) to make the data on the drive effectively irrecoverable. --- but, if the NSA is after you for violating the Nuclear Secrets Act, all bets are off.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
I am collecting old USB flash drives for the Center for Victims of Torture's 2009 Sneakernet Campaign.
If you are looking to get rid of old Flash drives you can go ahead and send them to:
Beth Wickum
Director of Volunteer Services
The Center for Victims of Torture
717 E. River Parkway
Minneapolis, MN 55455
After hearing about a lack of networks in many places where CVT operates we discussed the use of flash drives to transfer information. At this point my inner geek jumped up and screamed: "It's a sneakernet!" My co-workers hadn't heard the term before and thought it catchy enough to make part of the marketing for a campaign to solicit used flash drives to send to CVT locations overseas as well as partner organizations. The idea is simple, send CVT your tired, poor, and old flash drives. I'll scrub them and clean them up and make them ready to give away. No personal information will stay on a donated drive.
Dixi et salvavi animam meam
Donating, schmonating. We're at the start of Depression #2, and every penny counts. I earn around $300 each month just selling old stuff like videos, books, and gadgets. Amazon is good for earning a higher price, but it does require patience. Ebay is better if you want to get rid of stuff right now:
- List it for 99 cents and $5 ship/handling
- Or 1 cent and $6 ship/handling
Please note I said S&H not postage. Shipping is for the ~$3 postage, but the "handling" covers your personal labor (you don't work for free) and the outrageous fees ebay charges (they don't work for free either). Someone will buy your item because there's always someone looking for old items, and you'll make around a dollar profit for each flash or hard drive sold. Possibly more if the demand is high.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
In addition, because of the ratio used, two sheets of one size fit exactly onto the next size up, so fitting multiple small pages onto a larger sheet is also a doddle. This is useful for saving paper when printing long documents, or for example when printing four A6 invitations on a sheet of A4.
Just an FYI, the American 8.5*11 paper standard does the same thing. A letter sized page is called ANSI A. Two side by side form a sheet that is 11*17 is ANSI B, which you may be familiar with as the wide computer paper. It is also called "ledger" or "tabloid". Two ANSI B sheets, side by side form an ANSI C sheet, two Cs form a D and two Ds form an ANSI E. ANSI Es are used for wall sized maps, and correspond to the metric A0. Unfortunately, the aspect ratio doesn't match that from a step up/down, however it does match the aspect ratio for two steps up or down. Thus it is easy to scale a four to a page layout.
I wish we would ditch the American standard here in the Great White North, but our biggest trading partner is the US, and since they're still in the horse and buggy era when it comes to measuring systems and since they outnumber us ten to one, we need to play along.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Ebay double and triple dips when it comes to listing fees. Depending on the listing you are charged for: base listing cost + some percentage of starting bid/reserve price; additionally you are charged for a percentage of the ending price.
Ebay does not charge more for listings based on the shipping fees, which is what encourages sellers to gouge so much.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
Since Perl is pretty loosely typed, Once it overflows its int type, it'll become a float type, then it'll just keep growing till it hits infinity.
Or until, in float, you run out of precision in the mantissa so that you can't fit 1 and the number in the same range. The proverbial 3000000000000000 + 1 = 3000000000000000.
For IEEE754 32 bit float, that's about 24 bits worth of float, so about 16,777,216 is the biggest for single precision float.
#include <stdio.h> int main(void) { int i; float j = 16777210; for (i = 0; i < 10; i++) { printf("%f\n", j); j = j + 1; } return 0; }
16777210.000000
16777211.000000
16777212.000000
16777213.000000
16777214.000000
16777215.000000
16777216.000000
16777216.000000
16777216.000000
16777216.000000
Note the saturation at 216.
--Carlos V.
"Thumb Drive Drive - Do you have old thumb drives (otherwise known as USB Memory Sticks) at your office or home that you don't use anymore? We're collecting these drives to share with the organizations we work with. They can be used in hundreds of useful ways by: * Teachers * Students * Relief Camp Workers Please keep sending them in to Inveneo here and we'll make sure they get out to people and organizations who can use them well: Inveneo 972 Mission Street 5th Floor San Francisco, CA 94103"
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
Hmm... the link didn't work.
http://www.mail-archive.com/dbi-users%40perl.org/msg29840.html
Must be because of the "at" symbol in the original URL. I've replaced it with the hex value.
Convert FLACs to a portable format with FlacSquisher
"All recently made hard disks have a built in secure erase function that erases on the disk level."
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Unfortunately, I can't share the scripts. And they wouldn't be of much use, either, because of the huge differences amongst systems. Slackware != Ubuntu != CentOS != OS X, etc
And I must say up front that it wasn't originally my idea. I only know the person who showed it to me (thanks, EW!).
I can explain an overview on how to set up:
1) Identify how your machine (OS/distro) identifies USB Devices. If they always come up as, say, '/media/USBDISK', you may be gold. Some systems will replace USBDISK with the formatted name of the drive. Simple solution: format all of your drives for this with the same name.
2) Find out how your drive handles startup scripts (is it Linux /etc/init.d/, or OS X launchd?), and how to always ensure the script gets run at boot (priority levels, chkconfigs, this is all different based upon system).
3) Have one script (say, checkUSB.sh) that forces an attempt at doing a mount, and then does a simple -f (bash) test to see if a file is present. ie, 'mount /dev/sdc1 /media/USBDISK; if [ -f /media/USBDISK/checkUSB.sh ]; then do_something; fi'. Depending on the system, you may not have to worry about doing the mount manually. Some OS's will have things automount before your script runs. That is a very happy, very sane environment to work with :]
4) All I have 'checkUSB.sh' do is copy a second shell script down from the drive. So, on every USBDISK, there is a shell script called 'install.sh'. The contents of this script can vary by machine (ie, my DNS flashkey's install.sh does different things than my firewall flashkey's install.sh). At this point, checkUSB.sh should call install.sh (if you are anal, you can do md5 checksums on the transfer to ensure it was copied correctly -- important for a safe/secure/important environment).
5) install.sh is where all the magic happens. The contents of this script varies, but it usually involves performing atomic moves (based upon success and checksums) to ensure everything happens or nothing happens. For example, almost all of my keys change the network configuration, so I include a new ifconfig file on the flash key. The process may work like this: move old ifconfig to ifconfig.old, md5sum the ifconfig on the flashkey, move ifconfig from flashkey to machine, perform md5sum. If md5sums match, move on to next file in script. If md5sums do not match, move old back to original (for all files) and note failure somewhere on the machine. You can also put in system beeps if you'd like. Once all files are transferred and md5sums confirmed, delete all original files.
6) At the end of the script, you should halt the machine from booting (it needs to boot with fresh files). I prefer to do a shutdown -h, as this will ensure to me that the data was read off the flash key. If you do a restart, you'll need to know that the machine went down and up (and finished copying), which is hard to do with a headless machine on a rack. If the machine goes fully down (and the power out), you'll know the script ran to completion. Otherwise, the machine can be put in a continual restart state.
good luck and let me know if your system works!
I'm a professor in Uganda. Here, as most places in Africa, flash drives are the transport of choice because the network speeds are crap (and Uganda's is far from the crappiest). People are poor and any of my students would love one. I could pretty much just walk up to an undergrad, even with a 32 MB drive, and say "Take" -- if he didn't need it, a friend of his would. The trouble is, if you shipped them to me, they would disappear in the mail room/roach motel at Entebbe airport. But who's to say the postal worker doesn't need one too?
http://www.freecycle.org/
Kramden Institute
Kramden Institute Inc. is a 501(c)3 not-for-profit charitable institution based in Durham, NC that is dedicated to empowering hardworking economically disadvantaged students to bridge the digital divide and advance their academic and personal achievements by awarding them home PC computers. This is achieved by collecting donated computers, refurbishing, and reusing computers thereby extending their useful lives and reducing e-waste.
Screw Ebay, put them on Craigslist.
"Since anything you're taught about computers is mostly obsolete in a few years..."
You're not a programmer, are you? I ask because no programmer would ever say that.
The C programming language came out in 72, and C++ came a few years later. Both are in the top three most popular programming languages "based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third party vendors" and they make up 25% out of the top 20 languages in the list. Although the number one language, Java, makes up 19%, it "derives much of its syntax from C and C++" and Java came out in 1995.
Other sources say C is still responsible for nearly 50% of new open source projects, followed by Java with 28%.
So even if you took a programming class 30 years ago it would still very much apply today.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
Lost them from *using* them at altitude, I'd imagine. That's a well-known issue. The spindle system relies on air pressure to keep the heads at the right height off the disk. Spin it at too low of a pressure and you get a head crash.
I'm not going to be spinning the drives in vacuum bags ;)
Stale pastry is hollow succor to one who is bereft of ostrich.