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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?"
Scrub the data then donate it to charity or a school. If they can't use it they can give it away to a client or resell it.
I'm sure some /.ers have some 5 or 10MB drives in their closets.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
find a local charity to donate them, or if nothing else then just freecycle it, somebody will take you up on it!
Ignotium per Ignotius!
I can't speak for small hard drives, but a great thing you can do with a 40 GB external hard drive is to install a persistent live linux disk to it. One of the best seems to be portable linux. That way, you always have a bootable OS around which will work with just about any hardware that can boot from USB, which is really valuable for troubleshooting, etc. I use mine to do things like fix grub problems, or use gparted to resize partitions, etc. With a persistence-capable live distro, you can customize all your settings and install any tools you like which aren't included on the default live disk, and even treat it as a mobile home when you're traveling.
I keep as many old computer parts around as I can find room for. They are good as spare parts and for building extra machines.
Drives in particular are good for keeping backups on. If you are about to install a new OS for example, you can just dump an image of you current setup on an old drive and just keep it in a drawer somewhere.
If you have a flash drive that you suspect wont take much more writing you can install a tool set on it and then just keep it around for emergencies.
Compact flash cards can be used as IDE drives if you get a tiny, cheap bit of hardware. ( Use it to boot a small linux distro to a ram disk. Perfect for a quick booting terminal box, router or light weight server. )
I guess you just need to tinker more. :D
You cannot have too many backups. Old drives are perfect. Mount 'em, fill 'em with your configs, docs, etc. and put 'em away. Just make sure you always have the appropriate hardware and kernel support to read them if necessary.
Mine are ATA/IDE, and these interfaces will be deprecated very soon, I hear. So keep at least one IDE/ATA-to-USB housing around if you need their data.
the cost of shipping is not worth it for whoever does it.
The Africans making a living taking care of our electronics "waste" would probably disagree with you.
Just because we don't consider it worth our health to use nasty chemicals to reclaim metals from scrap boards, doesn't mean no one should want to do it.
For massive media, maybe 512MB is small. Movies and such, no way, I agree there.
On the other hand, my 512MB card has massive amounts of e-books, saved web pages that have since disappeared off the net, tiddlywikis of my personal information, backups of gnucash files and web sites I've developed over the years ...
A small SD can be functional too. I write my NaNoWriMos on one and carry it around with me along with a keychain CD card reader. Any time the inspiration hits me, I can plug in to any computer with a free USB port and add to my word count.
You'd be surprised how much can fit on 512MB when you go beyond movies n' music.
Yeah but he was not in the teachers union. Can't have non-union teachers running around out there causing problems.
Libraries, especially school libraries, often have a need for portable storage devices to help patrons move files around, for instance from one computer to another. Big drives get stolen, but old small ones don't so much. And if an old obsolete drive is taken, then it was free to the library.
Other public or semi-public computer labs probably could use them too. Think job centers, state-funded computer training groups, underfunded K12 schools, et c.
It IS our concern whether or not "nasty chemicals" are used. Once they're in the environment, it's only a matter of time before we all get affected.
I had a computer that crashed on me one too many times. I threw it into a river near the ocean. This river was a mix of fresh and salt water. A month or two later I fished the computer out and took it home. I did have to evict a few crabs that were living in it. I let it dry outside. My computer room is the basement. I put down a tarp and put the old computer on this tarp. The seaweed and other things that had started to grow in/on it. I said a loud to my other machines, to behave or a fate worse then this awaits you.
That was 10 years ago. Other then 2 hard drives failing. I have not had a bad motherboard, RAM, or any other failed computer part. Threatening the computers worked.
Old drives are not as energy efficient as modern drives, so they cost more to spin -- a RAID would just be an expensive storage container
Exactly -- which is why I'm right now in the process of doing just that. I'm building a RAID 6 on my five old 250GB drives, and when I'm done, I'm going to remove them, individually vacuum-seal them and silica gel packets with my food sealer, duct tape the bundle together, and ship it off across the country as an offsite backup. ;)
Are there better things that could be done with them? Probably. Is there a better way to do offsite backups? Probably. But I have them and I need an offsite backup, so why not? Certainly seems a better use than dissecting them for fun.
Stale pastry is hollow succor to one who is bereft of ostrich.
For the hard drive, disassemble one in front of them and get their interest and curiosity.
I did this with a floppy drive one time - it had died, nothing I could do was going to bring this thing back so...why not? Why not just open the thing up and show what's inside, pointing out the magents and the drive heads etc.. I'm not going to say it instilled a lifelong wish to become computer scientists or electrical engineers in them, but it held some interest for a few minutes, gave a bit more understanding and broke down one more piece of black-box mystique.
Cheers,
Ian
For the flash drives, fill them with your favorite MP3 songs, hundreds of them. Then trade them with other people who are doing the same. Trade a 512Mb drive for one the same size with someone in your office or class. If you are a student, try setting up an underground library where other students contribute flash drives filled with various genres of music, like alt-country or 19th-century German classical. Trade or 'check out' these flash drives from this underground library instead of doing file downloading. This way you can get hundreds of songs at one time without exposing yourself to the RIAA extortionists.
For SATA and IDE drives, get a USB-to-IDE/SATA interface for about $20. These drives can now be used as unplugged backup of things like movies, music libraries, and huge data banks. This is for things that you access several times a year and don't need to always be on your main PC/laptop hard drive.
The funniest thing about this comment is that it shows up immediately after an anonymous coward listing several things he'd like to do with the old equipment.
I'll second that. And, if you are worried about it, wipe the data using something like dban's boot-n-nuke software, then donate to a local charity. I help with one myself, and we always need more hard drives, as a lot of companies will strip 'em out before donating their computers.
True, too, although the equipment described here isn't really "junk". Anything over about 4GB can take an Ubuntu install and still have enough for quite a few documents. A 40GB drive would be welcome almost anywhere. To give some idea of the numbers, right now in the Geeks Without Borders warehouse, we've got about 200 motherboards that are P-3 or better, and only 6 drives that are over 20GB.
If the masses can keep you down, you're not the Ubermensch.
The nasty chemicals originally came from the ground.
You mean like oil, coal, and uranium? Yeah, things from the ground can't cause environmental damage.
In a lot of ways, that might have been the BEST possible way for him to teach that class! Since anything you're taught about computers is mostly obsolete in a few years, learning how to learn on your own is THE most critical skill in the industry, IMHO. Second is learning how to troubleshoot/debug...
I was gonna say harvest the magnets too - nothing like a hard drive magnet to keep stuff from falling off of your fridge! Plus they are weird shapes so they look odd and artistic on the fridge.
If you feel the need, but so far, no one has even done zeros.
http://16systems.com/zero/
Check out my sysadmin blog!
- List it for 99 cents and $5 ship/handling
- Or 1 cent and $6 ship/handling
Personally I'd much rather buy a $6.01 item with free shipping than a 0.01 item with $6 shipping. It just feels more upfront and honest.
I despise "1 cent item plus $20 shipping and handling listings". If you want 20 bucks just fucking come out and say so. Do you think I'm going to be so stupid as to latch onto the 1 cent item because its such an awesome deal, and my brain will cease functioning before I figure out what the actual final cost is?
Out of curiosity though... is this to game ebay's commission structure? ie... if I pay 1 cent plus 20 shipping and handling does the seller get to keep more money than if it was 15.01$ plus $5 shipping?
If that's the case I don't really blame the seller for doing this. But it still annoys me because the stuff I buy on ebay is usually based on price, and if everything is 1 cent, and then I have to go and read what the shipping is, and whether the seller will combine shipping on multiple items... wastes my time and makes ebay less useful.
Interesting.
Some parts will last and others are just junk.
The hard drives are junk.
--My dad had a stack of old hard drives, each was 10 megabytes, and each drive was the size of one of those old Commodore 64 floppy disk drives. (Another piece of utterly obsolete hardware which we have all conveniently banished from memory.) They're land fill.
The USB plugs however. . . Those are more interesting. Some universal sockets seem to have very long use-lives. Think of the common headphone audio jack. The phone jack. Heck, the wall-socket power cord plug and light-bulb screw. We'll have to wait and see, but the humble four pin USB socket might possibly fall into that category.
That means those memory sticks might actually be worth keeping files on the same way you keep old books on shelves. The only problem I see is that silicone is somewhat like glass in windows; it's a slow-moving liquid which deforms with age. --Windows in old buildings have glass which is thicker at the bottom than at the top because of the glacial migration. Hm. Even glaciers move more quickly than glass does, but I seem to recall reading that V'ger's chips were failing because of this. Maybe when memory chips are made from carbon based minerals we will truly be in an age of archival-quality micro-chips.
Hm.
No, I think that computer junk is computer junk and this is just something we have to live with. I know NorTel spent a lot of research into how to make components recyclable, or at least destroyable in a way which was not toxic, knowing that computer components have a short life-expectancy and that planning for their entire life cycle was important.
It's not as bad, though, as old CRTs and automobiles, but even they decompose eventually to be reclaimed by the Earth. None of it is nuclear waste, thankfully.
Ashes to ashes. . .
-FL
Yup. And it's prohibited by their rules, so the best way to get rid of it is to report it.
No. The best way to get rid of it is to change the rules.
So... looking at the fees;
Right now its 8.75% on the first 25, and 3.5% on 25.01 to 1k and 1.5% on 1k+
Fee on an auction that was $20+$5 is $1.75
Fee on an auction that was $1+$24 is $0.09
Fee on an auction that was $3+$3 is $0.26
Fee on an auction that was $0.01+$6 is $0.00
No wonder people gamed the system.
Solve the problem trivially:
Charge 5.75% on the first 25$ including shipping. (For categories like books, games, dvds, toys, collectibles, etc, etc)
Under this regime:
Fee on an item that is $20+$5 is 1.43.
Fee on an item that is $1+$24 is 1.43.
Fee on an item that is $3+$3 is 0.35
Fee on an item that is $0.01+$4.99 is 0.35
For people who were playing by the rules it amounts it changes things a bit, price goes up 9 cents on a cheap item; but goes down around 32 cents for items closer to 25. Overall, its a pretty fair change.
But for people who were gaming the system, well, now they can't.
And now there is actually an incentive to combine shipping on multiple orders to a single buyer, as their ebay fees would go down accordingly, and their profit actually goes up slightly. Under the current regime where people are taking their profit in shipping, they actually either lose money when combining shipping or piss off buyers by refusing to do so.
And by removing all the gaming and improving the customer experience, ebay will easily come out ahead.
The solution is to change the rules.
"is mostly obsolete in a few years,"
False.
The information I learned about computers in 1980 is still valid. Is there MORE stuff? sure.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Nonsense, when it comes to software engineering there's no such thing as obsolescence, and mostly not within a matter of years.
You just got troll'd!
Seconded! Don't know if the USB sticks are big enough to be good or not.. but notebook SATA? Are you kidding me? These are NOT worthless, no matter how small. A 40GB external can be plenty useful too. If someone has something that "needs" a large USB storage, but not the portability of a USB stick, a USB HD is fine.
Just because we don't consider it worth our health to use nasty chemicals to reclaim metals from scrap boards, doesn't mean no one should want to do it.
Actually, it does, given that here in the 1st world, we have the technology and knowledge to reclaim the metals without putting hundreds of thousands of people in immediate danger, and with probably far greater efficiency in terms of recovery amounts and emissions per quantity recovered. That's the first piece of the pie.
The second piece of the pie: in case you hadn't noticed, we all inhabit the same planet. Those nasty chemicals, smoke, etc...they don't magically go away just because they were created on a country far away by people who look different.
Come back when you've read Silent Earth, please.
Please help metamoderate.