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?"

Comments

The answer is obvious

[0xdeadbeef]

Go back in time to 1960 and sell them for several hundred million each.

Re:ebay maybe?

[egcagrac0]

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.

Donate old USB drives to help victims of torture

[SteamedPenguin]

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.

Re:Chuck'em out

[iamhassi]

"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.