Slashdot Mirror
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?"
http://www.yellowchrome.org/1com/galaxytribune/sos.html
Whats better than whipping it out and playing some starcraft?
Don't just chuck them. Look for a high-school that has a proper computer engineering program, and drop them off there. Whether you give them to the teachers or the students directly, they'll love you for it.
I remember building and disassembling many a computer in my class before I was able to install windows 95 (and subsequently, starcraft) on them.
What's the value of information that you don't know?
You could ebay them, if your time is worth nothing. To prep them, you'd have to mount them on a machine and securely wipe them (on a windows box download sdelete for free from sysinternals.) Use the -z option to wipe free space (critical for cleaning flash drives.)
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. So unless you have a need for old, small drives (say an old, small machine) the safest advice would be to destroy them.
I like playing with neodymium magnets, so I take my drives apart and harvest them. Bending and flexing the platters will render them unreadable by almost anyone but the NSA, so unless you're protecting treasonable secrets, it's probably not worth the effort to do much more damage than that. (Be careful, glass platters don't flex - they shatter.) If you are that paranoid, heating them beyond their Curie point will absolutely destroy any stored information.
John
Its only really fun if they've burned you. If they've served you faithfully, what kind of treatment is that? I say take them out viking style : take a toy ship to carry them into the afterworld, set it ablaze with a flaming arrow while chanting some nordic verse.
Valhalla awaits:
, Platter sure, heads swift
glorious memory
failed us not.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
ART!!!
for(b=(a=0)+1;;b+=(a+=b))print(a+"\n"+b+"\n");
Wait, high schools have computer engineering programs?! My high school seemed to be interested in finding the least qualified teacher possible for our computer-related classes, even though I found a professor from a prestigious university who was willing to teach the computer science classes. So not fair. :(
or salvation army or whoever in your city will take them (Austin TX has a very active Goodwill Computer Store).
Full format them first (not perfect, but there are so many drives with data on them that it is unlikely that someone will go to great lengths to read the edges of formatted tracks). If they don't format then break them down (cool magnets and platters that are better for target practice than CDs - they don't shred as easily).
Keep a few around, especially USB keys - better than burning something to CD is you need to hand data to someone.
I build all of my rack machines from the same ISO image (well, images. One for Linux, one for OS X).
Within this image, there is a script that runs at boot time that checks for the presence of a USB Drive. If there is a USB Drive, the script will place machine specific configuration files from the USB Key onto the machine in question, so that the machine no longer holds a vanilla install, but instead a completely unique version.
This is great for replacing a down machine on a network -- if 'node1.example.com' goes down, just grab a waiting, fresh machine from the stock pile, insert the usb key labeled 'node1', and start the machine, and watch as the machine takes on the persona of 'node1' without user interaction. Kind of similar to a kickstart script, but with the versatility of being able to change an already configured machine.
Hard drives have strong (and small) magnets in them which are fun to play with, useful on your fridge, useful in woodshops (hanging tools), and probably useful just about anywhere.
Little flash drives, even 8MB ones, can be useful for students and library users. Donate those puppies, please.
In both cases (IDE/SATA and most modern SCSI drives which actually all do maintain an internal badblocks list (and a finite store of reserve blocks - i.e. high-capacity magnetic disks have been doing internal levelling for a while too), and wear-levelled flash drives), there is some risk of data recovery from blacklisted sectors that won't ever be wiped subsequent to their blacklisting. i.e. just because the drive can't/won't use the block anymore, even to write random data to it, doesn't mean the appropriate scanning microscope or whatever tools can't recover data from the "bad" blocks.
That almost certainly doesn't matter to anyone remotely normal, but if you're feeling maximally paranoid, thermite is your data-erasure friend...
During my senior year (1997), my high school created an Intro to C Programming class. Since I had pretty much mastered TI-BASIC during various boring math and english classes, and had been lazily self-teaching myself C at home for a year or two, it seemed like a good idea.
They gave the calculus teacher a dozen 8086s (to be honest, you don't really need anything more than DOS at 8MHz to compile and run Hello World) and had him take night classes at the local Vo-Tech. He set up the curriculum so that he was teaching us about a week behind what he was learning in his own class.
I spent most of the semester helping my classmates learn what he was trying to teach, and yes, sometimes correcting his mistakes directly. I was so bored by the time the final project rolled around, I had to do SOMETHING to make it challenging. So, I wrote my final program for my TI-85, by setting up a cross compiler under a PC emulator on my Amiga, and loading the executable using ZShell. Easily the most fun I've had for a school programming project.
I have taken apart many 2 to 10 gigers, those magnets are STRONG.
Stick them on the fridge ask someone to get one off and give it to you. Its fun trying to see them try.
http://www.computer-hardware-explained.com/images/hard-drive-magnet.jpg