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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?"
Do what I did to my old printer that kept telling me to "PC load letter".
What? Load the paper cassette with letter sized paper?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Yah, I was going to say extra backups, but you beat me to it. They're much quicker to pull data back from than tape or DVD, and if they fail you haven't lost anything but the couple of minutes you spend slotting it in to an external drive enclosure.
I wish people wouldn't imply that upgrading hard disks is "proper computer engineering". The status of an "engineer" has already been degraded as it is by people referring to photocopier repair bods as "engineers" even though they have no engineering qualifications at all.
Not even necessary
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Check out my sysadmin blog!
Many not-for-profit businesses could benefit from this kind of thing. I used to volunteer at several and there was always a need for things like thumb drives and external hard drives.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
No, don't do that. The bits have a minuscule but nonzero probability of smashing together into a validly partitioned volume containing a virus or something nasty (or an invalid one that crashes Windows). It's very improbable (I think), but possible.
Besides, who cares if they can tell you wiped it? A regular pattern doesn't mean they can reverse the overwrite operation (probably; we don't know what the NSA can do).
$ make available