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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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
If you feel the need, but so far, no one has even done zeros.
http://16systems.com/zero/
Check out my sysadmin blog!
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.