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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?"
Chuck'em out.
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.
FreeGeek.
Advice: on VPS providers
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'll take them
Do what I did to my old printer that kept telling me to "PC load letter".
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
With the higher energy consumptions of older drives it's just more economical to recycle.
Older flash drives will be unreliable soon.
So I suggest the obvious: just recycle or find someone locally, who wants the stuff (poor student etc...) But do not send to Africa because I feel it's just shifting the problem and the cost of shipping is not worth it for whoever does it.
Type up your passwords and encryption keys and put the device in a safe somewhere.
It seems like a 1 kilobyte file is more likely to last on a hard drive if you store 50 million copies of it. (And if you store 500,000 copies of the file on a CD, you're less likely to be screwed by a scratch.) Is there an easy way to automate this duplication? Some weird "very small, very-high-repetition on same volume" file system, or just a perl script?
We recently had heard in the office over one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions.
Load them up with porn and give them to random people anonymously. They will thank you for it!
Monstar L
This should about double the /. server storage space.
You'll need to throw in ISA SATA and USB cards though.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
or MEbay.
If you live in QC, Canada, I'll take them from you.
I just pooped your party.
The 250 giggers are on the nas box holding backups, one 100 gig laptop drive replaced the 40 gig drive on the Apple TV, the other is holding a copy of Windows 7 so I didn't bork the Ubuntu drive on the media box...
The 512 mb sd cards, OTOH, pitch 'em. I can't believe I'm saying this, but half a gig just isn't enough space to do anything with...movies are 700 Mb, as are most distros. (I use unetbootin to get away from burning CD's when testing out new distros these days.)
That's the price of progress, I guess.
Now, count the number of mass storage devices you have, between phones, DVR's, game machines, MP3 players, etc.
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
Mail them to me.
...especially high schools, for those seniors trying to write final, massive papers, and (now fairly late) college essays. A school I worked at had a sign-out sheet for them, so kids could take their half-typed papers home.
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." -- Albert Einstein
http://www.yellowchrome.org/1com/galaxytribune/sos.html
Whats better than whipping it out and playing some starcraft?
When I have obsolete hardware I put it in a cardboard box and put it out by the curb...it's gone within an hour or so. Of course, I live in the downtown area of my city, dominated by lower-income residential housing, and there is always someone that wants the hardware. Don't get me wrong, it doesn't go to the dump, it gets picked up by people who want old computer parts. There's a market for everything, even if it's not going to be profitable :)
.sig
Putting a live XP or Linux distribution onto it makes it a fine rescue disk.
Give 'em to your church.
Use them for backups of small things.
Add them to the internal usb ports on your pc or pci card for some hidden always-available storage.
S
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 use sub-GB sticks like floppies of yore when I don't have a LAN available. They are more convenient than a CD-R.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Zero wipe them, then donate them to schools or charities which send computers to less fortunate countries or maybe academic research institutes.
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
Take them to a recycling center, so they can be loaded onto container ships and sent to China so they can have their precious metals reclaimed over a charcoal fire.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
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
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.
You don't have a use for them, so what makes you think someone else will?
If you're not worried about the possibility of someone recovering sensitive data off of them, donate them to some charity...Maybe someone there will find a use for them, but don't be surprised if they refuse your tech junk: they won't want to pay the disposal fee either.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Explosives + Old Hardware = Good Times!
You say you want a revolution....
Go back in time to 1960 and sell them for several hundred million each.
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.
We've seen the awesomeness of floppy drive RAID. Memstick RAID will blow that away!
http://www.greendisk.com
ART!!!
for(b=(a=0)+1;;b+=(a+=b))print(a+"\n"+b+"\n");
Will they blend?!
Blend it!
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
Or just do
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/disk bs=1k
It hasn't been successfully recovered from, to my knowledge
Check out my sysadmin blog!
try this http://www.bigbruin.com/reviews05/thumbraid_1
1. Buy a Black Sharpie(TM) pen (the thin sharpie would be best in my past experience). 2. Locate the reference to the drive size on the manufacturers label located on the top of the drive enclosure (typically in GB). 3. Gently (as to not damage the disk platter below the label and enclosure) using the Sharpie(TM) cross out that number and replace with the desired capacity above or below the factory stamped capacity. NOTE: depending on how the drive manufacturer has detailed the size on the label, you might have space above the factory size reference or below the reference.
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.
You may collect some more HDDs and arrange them into a domino game. See Youtube for videos if you need some tips. Repair4HardDisk has a collection of modding ideas for old or dead hard disk drives, for example making a clock from the platters. Here is a resource of modding ideas for USB sticks, too.
You forgot to tell him to stand in front of it to make sure it cooks properly.
Hard drives are a lot like hot dogs, you don't wanna cook them without your face right there next to the glass.
You can't take the sky from me.
Given that most (if not all) flash drives use wear leveling, can flash drives be wiped by software?
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Would that be possible to combine these USB keys to build a bigger (if not fast) SSD? Considering USB is serial, I am sure you could do somthing useful out of them.
...subject says it all really. Check out the astlinux distribution.
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.
Its call Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks for a reason. Seriously thats one of the reasons RAID was invented. I want to see what a few hundered 1 gig flash drives would do in a massive stripe :)
Oh wait. Dumb idea.
Deleted
With the very low cost of storage nowadays, I would not bother reusing or donating the drives. Take out the platters of the HDD, or the whole USB key, and go smashy smashy with a hammer. Collect the pieces and take it to a electronics recycling center. One nice side effect, is the smashy smashy bit is a great stress reliever, just wear safety glasses and perhaps gloves.
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.
Put something on the USB key which you deem important to know (hear, see, read etc.), then 'lose' it somewhere. Someone might find it and check what's on it.
OK, there's the internet. Hm.. But I'd guess that people value a found piece of hardware higher than some arbitrary web page.
Say out loud: I'm an Aspie and I'm somewhat proud, I guess. Uh. Can I write an email in all caps instead? Hm...
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.
sdelete -z works by creating random-filled temporary files on a drive until all space is filled, then it deletes the temporary files. The concept should work equally well on a flash drive.
John
It hasn't been successfully recovered from, to my knowledge
It can't be, on any drive made this century and most drives from the last decade of the previous one. If you've got confidential data stored on old drives that use MFM recording (not necessarily an MFM interface) then you might need to worry.
Put Ubuntu with Folding@Home on it. Boot any old computers you have hanging around into folding machines without actually installing an OS.
One nice side effect, is the smashy smashy bit is a great stress reliever, just wear safety glasses and perhaps gloves.
In the case of a drive that really isn't prime for donation or repurosing (I'd rather see them reused than destroyed), I'll second this. It's also a great perk for a subordinate. One time we had a junior tech who was just having a hell of a week. I plucked an old 4gb scsi drive off the shelf, gave it to him, and said, take this out back and beat the crap out of it. When he came back in he had a huge grin on his face and he sure felt better about life.
0. erase your old harddrives and unwanted flash media.
1. Find a medium sized box.
2. fill box with your old harddrives and USB sticks.
3. take to your local electronics recycle/disposal center. because I assume there is at least something toxic in an old harddrive. and there are valuable materials.
maybe they'll remake the aluminum cases into new harddrives.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gz7x_ogTP8
Is this a news report or a trailer for a motion picture?
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.
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.
You should keep them and wait until a huge value enhancement for ancient usb stick appears to happen. I'm quite sure this will happen sometime.
I bought this nice cable for 15$ that allows you to plug any SATA or ATA IDE harddrive to a USB port. Basically, any HD becomes a portable USB drive!
I use it for backups or large data transfers that would split on multiple DVDs. Best 15$ I ever spent.
Use the small flash drives to store your tax files if you use turbo tax or tax cut software with burned CD backup of course, they store well in a safe, great way to keep sensitive information OFF your hard drive.
The Hard drives, if they have bad sectors the magnet make great refrigerator magnets if you need to stick a ream of paper to the door.
Also you can use them to make a pure DOS Gaming Box, kinda cool to hook up tot he TV and play Doom on them
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
s/([a-z])([A-Z])/${1}_$2/g
Real geeks don't strip spaces - they use underscores :P
(Unless you're a JavaScript programmer in which case I'm terribly sorry...)
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
I stack em on my electronics bench until I have a few stacked up and then harvest the motors (at least 2 low power DC and one fast-spinning AC) for maker projects. Not to mention a few small neodymium magnets
Oh yeah, and the previous poster was correct, the platters make very nice wind chimes :)
Is madness a syptom of genius or vice-versa?
I've had success selling 40GB drives on my local Craigslist for $10 a pop. I sold eight drives and had to turn people away, so there's definitely demand.
Option A: Download some content to it (music/movie/ebooks, etc) and gift them to a friend.
Option B: Download Metallica albums to it and lose it for someone else to find it. Be sure to attach this note in a readme file:
Share this crappy music! F*ck you Metallica! Napster Rul3z!
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.
Free Geek organizations (I can't speak for others) have a comittment to destroying data on donated drives before they go out again. If you don't want to (or are not allowed to) trust that, then you can download a copy of DBAN and nuke your drives for a few hours (or days) before you donate them.
For most civilian uses, 'dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdX' is sufficient (with today's drive density) to make the data on the drive effectively irrecoverable. --- but, if the NSA is after you for violating the Nuclear Secrets Act, all bets are off.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
If you're really paranoid, use /dev/urandom and make several passes.
Stale pastry is hollow succor to one who is bereft of ostrich.
Hi ! Personnaly, I just see there a gift to put in place some cheap RAID 5.0 Just aggregates small HDD, in order to have a set of at least 3 equal size virtual HDDs (using RAID 0), and put all of this together as a RAID 5. There you cheap storage, useful and secure... Even if a few of those disks die, you still can replace them by a newer with the good size (or even a greater one). (and so incrementaly getting rid of them as they die...)
Obsolescence is in the eye of the beholder. I have a (tiny, by /. standards) 40gb HDD that I have used for 3 years, and it's not even half-full. And probably a significant percentage of that is unneeded crap that I just haven't gotten around to deleting yet.
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." -- Eric Hoffer
Redundant Array of Recycled Realy-old Drives
Create like a god, command like a king, work like a slave. -Guy Kawasaki
You could always include them in a future sale on ebay or something....also bump up the price a bit.
"Buy now these ram sticks and get extra usb key flash drive!!"
Chuck them at people's heads. Especially the hard drives. Especially if the head belongs to a politician.
Old USB drives are good for archiving paperwork because it compresses well. Oh, wait, that was actually practical and I was trying to me silly and dumb. Never mind.
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.
Dixi et salvavi animam meam
...oh yeah, I forgot where I was for a moment...
The casting in most every disk drive is a good quality aluminum alloy, so you can also disassemble the drive and give the casting to a metal recycler, or melt it down to make a part for an electric motorcycle like this chap. http://www.theworkshop.ca/energy/suzuk_e/6/6.htm
7.62x54R + old hard drives = Good clean fun.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
That is what I pressed mine into service as. Get a cheap external case, put the drive in it. When you get a bunch of files that you need to give to a friend, more than reasonably upload, drop them on the drive and send them away. Hopefully you'll get the drive back but if you don't, oh well.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
If they are IDE you can sell them. I have a Aleses HD 24 Multi Track Audio Recorder and it uses IDE drives and any drive bigger is a waste because of track count limitations. we buy used ones for $30 when local musicians want to record. as for Thumb drives. They are good for creating recovery utility disk with a small Linux distro..
Old, small USB keys are good for storing small amounts of information for offline backup. Private keys, passwords, tax records, etc.
Build yourself a HERF gun (from the old microwave you need to recycle) and use the drives to test EMP resistance measures.
Magnets!
My daily carry piece (with CCW permit) lives in a fanny pack held closed with the magnets out of a couple of old 17gig Maxtor 3.5" drives. I ditched the zipper in favor of that setup, and it's a lot faster :).
Or remove all partitions, and create one large partition that fills the disk. Then use TrueCrypt to create an encrypted partition. It will write to the entire disk. Works in most OSes. The really paranoid can choose a tripple cipher.
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...
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.
I'll take them. PM me. I'll pay for shipping.
I wonder how hot platters have to be to melt? I have a small raku kiln that's hitting 2000Â F, with one propane burner. I'd have to get some high temp ceramic fiber blanket to do a multi-burner one but should be able to get 2500Â F.
Or, I could just pack the platters in a crucible with a bunch of glass and aluminum around the and see what kind of blob I get.
I drank what? -- Socrates
I would recommend
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/disk bs=1k
That puts random bits in place as opposed to a regular pattern. Not that it will stand up to NSA scrutiny but it's more than enough for most data recovery.
I'm shipping off to Cameroon with the Peace Corps in June. I'll be working in computer education and I've been told by those currently working in country that they are great to give out to students. So If you want to wipe them and donate them, what ever the size I would be happy to take them.
Feel free to email me at alec[no space]dhuse[at]gmail[dot]com
small usb drives are perfect to put inside geocaches, especially as first find - any nice cc photos, music or even programs will do as gifts, and google earth links or clues for finding other caches will be really interesting too (then you can have the usb key be a permanent part of the cache, so the finder may have to bring a laptop on the trail:)
At work one day, the day before the release of a product, my hard-drive went out. I kept it on my desk for a few months to serve as a warning to others. It was at this time I discovered that hard driver platters also make great coasters with the often flat rounded top. If you open them up you can also find a great mirror that also doubles as a novelty to look at. Just put the cover back on, just use one screw, and you can keep dust from dirtying your mirror up. Don't get me started on just how hard it is to clean the thing if you get fingerprints on it.
Besides the novelties of the hard-drives a friend of mine made a few trinkets from USB drives. Between the necklace, don't ask, they were used to store games for different consoles in emulator (SNES, Sega, Nintendo) form. A good spray job (red, yellow, green) to distinguish the consoles they were great for short term fun. Since they held enough to be useful might as well make them handy. Along with that if you setup a little net at the desk they double as mini basketballs. I've accidentally run over mine with a car, washed it twice, and they keep trucking. You could even get a USB hub, plug them all in, and use them as tiny hard-drives. Anyway, back to work I go.
If you feel the need, but so far, no one has even done zeros.
http://16systems.com/zero/
Check out my sysadmin blog!
Why not load up photos of the family's last vacation and take it with to the next Thanksgiving dinner? I'm sure everyone will be glad to see a slide show.
Normally I ascribe all life to intelligent design, but in your case I'll make an exception.
Use your oldest, least reliable, and soon-to-be-obsolete equipment to back up your critical data.
Backup up your data to tape or DVD, and save redundant snapshots of recent backups to old hard drives when one becomes available. Sometimes the drive itself becomes its own "final backup" after you copy the data to the new one and do its initial backup.
Then when you want to pull back a seven year old email message or something, you try the drive first. If the drive's still good, you just saved yourself half an hour fiddling with slow offline storage. If the drive's bad, then you're no worse off than if you didn't make the snapshot at all.
open it, remove the heads, harvest the nodimium magnets, spin the plater, pass the nodimium magnets over the plates over and over. use a small propane torch to heat them up to make it easier for the magnets to act.
or buy some strong chemical shit at the market (like pipe cleaning products. the ones based on sodium hydroxide are prefered) and dump the platers there.
What ? Me, worry ?
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.
Old hardware that's not worth selling on eBay isn't exactly hard to come by. If the high school is lucky enough to have a computer engineering program, they probably have better equipment than what you're about to throw away. Not to mention the storage rooms full of old equipment they're trying to get rid of.
Work to convince the big distros of the world -- I'm looking at you Ubuntu -- to switch from using CD Rom Images as their prime mode of distribution to bootable flash/usb/ide disk images. Once you've tried it this way you will never go back, and you will now have a use for little drives.
Of course there are scripts that will turn the CD images into usb stick images, but they are time consuming taking away some of the time you save booting from a quicker medium. Instead of releasing a CD and a script to convert it, release a drive image and a script to turn that into an ISO, or release both.
(Plus, with writable media, it's easier to add a 2nd partition where the user can stuff drivers, localization scripts, answers to install questions etc.)
Then you could also donate all these media to linux distros who could fill them up with linux live disks and installs, and mail them out to people for postage.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
Nice -- I'm a potter too! I hit 2200F in my raku kiln with a single burner and a piece of firewood split into kindling. I was just doing a clay test and my fiber is really worn, so I didn't go that far with it, but I would think that with several pieces of wood split into small kindling, you could get a bit more temperature. I'd wonder if using two burners will take it all the way to 2500F though, because you can only pump so much fuel into your kiln before you get reduction conditions -- it's going to be much easier to raise the temperature in oxidation, though of course in reduction, there may be chemical changes that lower the melting point. If you can get a 2-3 ft tall flame out of your exhaust hole with one burner, I doubt you can really put much more fuel in it. If you don't get that flame and are using a regulator, take off the regulator (and accept the danger). Here's my clay test and shot of the pyrometer at 2200: http://www.anagama-west.com/firing_log/archives/80
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
If you're really paranoid, use /dev/urandom and make several passes.
No that's if you're moderately paranoid....if you're really paranoid use a sledge hammer and fire. =)
I'd love to have a file system that took a bunch of small devices like that and set them up in a very tolerant raid-like system.
It would be great to throw 10 20gb USB drives on a giant hub and have 150-180gb of storage (I figure quite a bit will be taken up with redundancy)
A bank of 30 2gb flash drives might also be fun.
With that many pieces of media, you should be able to pull 2 drives without losing any data...
You should also be able to indicate which drives should be written to more and which should be used for data that changes less often...
The really neat part of this is that upgrading your disk should be as easy as yanking a 2gb flash drive, and throwing in an old 20gb usb hard drive. It should add the storage, move some of the data around to ensure your redundancy is still sufficient and get on with life.
My PS3 has a paltry 40GB SATA drive in it. I'd be more than willing to get a "used" 120/160GB drive off someone and upgrade my system.
Damnit, then I have to figure out what to do with the 40GB drive...
Really.
You could, for example, hold one in your hand and imagine a Beowulf cluster of 'these'.
FreeBSD bounties
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
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled with old storage media!
...Had this been an actual emergency, we would have fled in terror, and you would not have been informed.
http://www.ian.org/HD-Clock/ :-)
Yeah, it is pretty easy to get a reduction atmosphere in my kiln. I was thinking of making one with a larger exhaust (currently 4" round opening), with chimney to see if that would get things a bit hotter. I've seen these small (20lb propane bottle size) forges, with multiple burners that black smiths and metal workers use and they're hitting 2500F on up. Course, they're having the flame directly on the work piece so that could be part of it.
Will have to try combustible material in there. I've only been messing with Raku for a year or so, ever since I showed wife burner I put together from internet plans. Was planning on getting in to bronze casting but she showed me some books on kilns and away we went.
I drank what? -- Socrates
Remove the cover while it's still plugged in and watch the reading head move back and forth while it is being accessed by the computer. It's a fun sight. Having cover removed will greatly shorten the life span and cause occasional reading errors, but it will continue to work for a little while more.
If you get bored, you can make a hard drive speaker: http://www.instructables.com/id/Hard-Drive-Speaker-System/
What's this tesla turbine thing? http://www.instructables.com/id/Tesla-turbine-from-old-hard-drives-and-minimal-too/
So many fun things to do with old hard drives.
"All recently made hard disks have a built in secure erase function that erases on the disk level."
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
If the NSA knew how to do that, would they really give the technique away for $500? Moreover, would they reveal that they could do it for $500?
OTOH, no matter what, you'll never be 100% sure they can't get a given piece of data (unless you use a one time pad, which has its own problems. I am not an cryptographer, don't sue me if I'm wrong.).
$ make available
well, to be sure at use 3 passes. dd if=/dev/zero of = /x // to zero it //
tr '\0' '\377' /dev/zero |dd of=/x // to write all one's//
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/x // to write randoms to it//
Of course this assumes your running *nix and older versions like sunos and pre 5.2 aix don't even have a /dev/urandom or /dev/random.
I'd just find a drill press or a plasma cutter.
Plasma Cutter seems best to me.
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
Shoot, $6 would barely cover the actual shipping charge for a 3.5 hard drive. Maybe you could ship a flash drive or possibly a laptop drive for $3-4. But if you don't have a box and packaging to reuse that's another $4 or more. And then the 10 minutes to purchase the postage on usps.gov, print out the shipping label, schedule a pickup, and package the product is another $5 worth of my time. I despise the high shipping costs too, but anything less than $10 to me seems reasonable.
I'm a professor in Uganda. Here, as most places in Africa, flash drives are the transport of choice because the network speeds are crap (and Uganda's is far from the crappiest). People are poor and any of my students would love one. I could pretty much just walk up to an undergrad, even with a 32 MB drive, and say "Take" -- if he didn't need it, a friend of his would. The trouble is, if you shipped them to me, they would disappear in the mail room/roach motel at Entebbe airport. But who's to say the postal worker doesn't need one too?
http://www.freecycle.org/
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
Kramden Institute
Kramden Institute Inc. is a 501(c)3 not-for-profit charitable institution based in Durham, NC that is dedicated to empowering hardworking economically disadvantaged students to bridge the digital divide and advance their academic and personal achievements by awarding them home PC computers. This is achieved by collecting donated computers, refurbishing, and reusing computers thereby extending their useful lives and reducing e-waste.
Here is a HOWTO:
http://linuxgazette.net/151/weiner.html
j.
"Windows in old buildings have glass which is thicker at the bottom than at the top because of the glacial migration"
I read in Science News a long time ago a researcher measured late 19th century glass and found it had flowed an amount that would have taken over a thousand years. Turns out the way they used to cast glass had this side effect.
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
I've really wanted to get into metal casting for a long time now. I just have to get my act together and build something.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Small thumb drives are great for bootable utilities and installers. In my laptop bag right now, I have thumb drives with Darik's Boot and Nuke, g4u, the OpenBSD 4.4 install floppy image, installers for FreeBSD 7.1 i386 and AMD64, and a couple of live-CD-like KUbuntu sticks.
In many cases (like DBAN and OpenBSD) it's a simple matter of dd if=the-floppy-image of=/dev/da0 to prepare the drive -- thumb drives work very well as fake floppies. The FreeBSD and KUbuntu setups were a bit more complicated because they contain a lot more than a floppy image, but still fairly easy if you can Google.
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The problem is getting access to that functionality to be able to tell a drive to lock then erase itself. HDDErase is a utility that can get some machines to erase themselves via the IDE/ATS secure erase mechanism, but on a lot of computers, it won't run or be able to access the low level commands (usually the BIOS blocks access).
I have used this utility in my last job (combined with a pass of zeroing using DBAN for good measure) to ensure that repurposed computers are completely blank before leaving a secure premises.
Plenty of ideas. Even if they are broken. Could be good for parts.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I picked up an old 18" smoker (freecycle rocks!) and need to add some kao-wool to it, with a hole in the center about twice the diameter as the crucible I picked up (1 qt size). I figure a double layer (2" or so) with some kind of rigedizer should do.
I want to be able to cast jewelry so won't need to be smelting large amounts of bronze.
I'll post some links to my raku pics this evening.
I drank what? -- Socrates
If the NSA knew how to do that, would they really give the technique away for $500? Moreover, would they reveal that they could do it for $500?
You're correct, but do you seriously think the NSA is interested in what's on your hard drive? If they are, it's a good bet that the FBI will seize it before you can destroy it.
I don't understand why cryptography/data destruction discussions end up speculating on the NSA's capabilities. They're irrelevant, because if the US government truly wants information that you have, you've already lost. If you couldn't afford some senators to call off the hunt before it started, you don't have the resources to defend yourself.
Maybe I'm just being cynical, so if you have examples where destroying hard drives has kept someone out of Federal (or secret) prison I'd like to know.
E-mail them to me!
You don't need to be holding treasonable secrets to want a clean wipe. Thinking that way kleads to "He did a clean wipe, clearly he has treasonable secrets."
And yeah, I like harvesting the magnets as well.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Line up all your current hard drives and USB drives, and force them to watch as your slowly destroy one of the obsolete drives. Then tell them this is what will happen to them if they EVER give you write errors or get bad sectors!
Fear can be a powerful weapon!
No Sig for you!
You can get USPS Priority mail packaging for *Free* by requesting it from usps.com (or you can pick it up from the Post Office yourself).
And if it will fit in the USPS 'Small Flat Rate' box (regardless of weight), the actual postage cost is $4.80 if you use the website to print the postage.
So $6 would more than cover the actual cost to ship even an old 5.25 dinosaur hard drive, if you use a free flat-rate box from USPS.
I have one 512MB USB key that I got as a promo. For the longest time it just sat there. Then I decided that I had too many passwords, and too many places to use it. Now I use it for some of my important documents, documents that I'm taking to client sites, and most importantly, my copy of KeePass. I use the portable Windows version, put all my passwords in there, and now I only need to really remember 1 password when I'm at my computer. I plug it in when I get to work, take it back home with me when I leave, and the database is encrypted, so I should have enough time to redo all my passwords if someone should steal it. Now the data on there is more valuable than the hardware, and so is the convenience. If you want to take it a step further, you could encrypt the drive and have a more effective portable safe for all your documents, but it would be less useful for moving client data.
P.S. Of course I have a backup of the password database.
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
This is what I did with a leftover USB key:
http://blog.boogly.net/2008/10/diy-cow-usb-flash-drive/
I thought that was how M$ created Windoze Vista.
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
I take all my important data I don't want to lose, dump it to an old hard drive, leave it in a dresser drawer at grannies house in the spare bedroom.
Then I use another old one, leave it at moms house in the spare bedroom.
In these cases my relatives don't have a clue how to read them, but I could encrypt if I wanted to. My photo's and original documents mostly.
My photo collection keeps growing, and is the determining factor on what size is useful. Not couting photo's - well, really who has more than 40 GB of original non-photo/video/audio content? If you're backing up original documents that are mostly text/information based a 40GB drive should be plenty.
The secret is to NOT backup all those installers, ISO's, movies, music, porn etc.. that you downloaded. Really, you can get all of that again. Focus on your original work then dump hard drives in nooks and crannies at relatives houses. Off site backup!
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
You don't have to melt the platters to destroy the data -- you just have to heat the magnetic media beyond its Curie temperature. Of course, that means knowing what the magnetic media of the platters is made of.
The Curie point of neodymium magnets is about 300C, for samarium-cobalt it's up to about 800C, and for iron it's 768C. Your 2000F oven should be plenty hot enough.
John
Contact your local or favorite data recovery lab and see what they'll give you for them. I know that when we really need a drive, we've been known to pay $200 for a drive that is really not worth any more than $20.
Melting would be more fun.
But so would embedding it in molten glass/aluminum/bronze. Time to dig out some scsi drives.
I drank what? -- Socrates
Low cost??? I have to scrounge to get the $15 or $20 for the used 40 or 80 GB drives I see on Craigslist. Else I'm stuck with the 2-5 GB drives that came with the second- and third-hand computers that are all I have to educate myself with. Once the OS is installed, they're already almost full. My only USB drive is a 16 MB (yes, MB) freebie I got as a Google promo about 5 years ago.
If anyone has hardware you're basically chucking out the door, please consider posting it to your local LUG mailing list, then to Craigslist. Many of us would see your trash as a significant upgrade. I can't thank enough the guys that provided my old SGI and Sun boxes for free. They were virtually obsolete, but still useful to me to get a first exposure to IRIX and Solaris.
Constitutionally Correct
Securely wipe them if you must, then just give them to your local recycling plant. Personally, I dismantle old drives, give the magnets to my kids to play with and send the rest to the local recycling plant. There's really little else use for a 50Gb drive these days!!
Ridiculous Exhibit of Terminally Abused Retired Drives
Drives have powerful magnets. Maybe you should think of using that magnet to corrupt the data on the media. Degauss it, in effect.
Best regards.
You'll never get rid of the myth. People love it too much. Thanks for trying though...
However, be advised that this may affect the resale value.
Even worse, they could randomly come together and create something worse like kidde porn or Windows ME.
Actually, if I bought used media off of eBay or whatever, I would scrub it immediately.
I don't want your stinky, infested data on my machines, thank you.
Come to think of it, this is why I don't buy used media. I got enough problems with trojans, worms, malware of all types without *buying* it.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
It has been reported that the Bush White House destroyed lots of hard drives: though I may be premature it looks like Scooter will be the member of that merry band to get convicted of anything.
...which means boxen in future will not have any IDE/ATA native interfaces. Spend the $15 bucks now for an enclosure or cable (see poster above you) or you might have a box of doorstops.
maybe of my credit card data...the fire and hammer should still sell just fine...there is a timeless market for such things. ;p
If you're really paranoid, use /dev/urandom and make several passes.
No that's if you're moderately paranoid....if you're really paranoid use a sledge hammer and fire. =)
The funny thing is, the secure method is considerably quicker too. I did this once to a large pile of old drives for work. Please, please, please, make sure you use protective goggles and the like. I did and was thankful after a drive shot out at my face.
Granted, it might have been an improvement, but the evil supergenius look got a big taken down after Dr Evil satirized it.
"Common sense will be the death of us all"
Excellent advice. You can't use them for the purpose for which you originally acquired them; but alternate uses are excellent. I've got a smaller USB drive I keep some handy utilities on; sometimes from PortableApps.com (Windows), others are cygwin or linux versions of GNU utilities. All they have in common is that they are handy and don't require installation. Just run them off the thumb drive.
I'm sure there are lots of ways to use these devices; just not as you originally planned.
A friend of mine loves old harddrives. They have a lot of super heavyduty magnets in them. To my knowledge he just dismantles the drive and then sticks'm to his fridge but ... either way, ubermagnets are fun!
Strip out the screws/magnets (always good for the hardware bin), and throw the rest away?
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
So $6 would more than cover the actual cost to ship even an old 5.25 dinosaur hard drive, if you use a free flat-rate box from USPS.
The mailing cost of a flat-rate box that reasonably fits a 3.5" half-height drive is $10.35. That would be insufficient padding space for a 5.25" drive.
That's an interesting juxtaposition that you are rocking there.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
It's kind of a waste of a working HDD, but I'd create this DIY "USB Hard Drive"
Good for some laughs.
put the passwords for all your stuff on it, along with your will, in case you die. Leave it with your family.
-- Programming with boost is like building a house with lego. It's a cool but I wouldn't want to live in it
A 1gb USB drive is big enough to make a live CD type live USB disk.Ubuntu and Fedora have a nifty utility that allows you to make a live USB disk from a live CD image. The live USB has the big advantage over a CD in that you can save data and changes. Great recovery tool that you can carry around in your pocket. Most computers built in recent years can boot from USB by hitting F12 at the first bootup screen. If you find a machine riddled with malware and virus, a live USB Ubuntu can be used to save documents, photos etc without fear of cross contamination. I use a 4gb drive with Ubuntu 8.10 and ClamAV installed.
... give them to me instead. I like that one much better!
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
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.
Come back when you've read Silent Earth, please.
Bah. Silent SPRING, not Silent Earth *forehead slap*
Please help metamoderate.
Forget the harddrives. They are a source of good magnets, but apart from that cheap USB sticks are a better alternative.
Small usb sticks?
* I like to keep one with a debian net-install Image. E.g. many netbooks do not have CD-drives so you need a USB-stick, but it can be small.
* Store important information. Eg. put you PGP keys on it and keep it in your safe.
It you store it on both a CD-rom and USB-stick you will find out what last the longest.
* Keep servers quiet. If you have a server in you living room that you want to keep quite, you could put in a USB-stick and mount /var/log on in so the machanical disks does not spin up.
* OpenWrt Accesspoint typically have 16 to 32 MByte flash internally. Even a small USB stick can make a big difference.
My thoughts exactly. The macho factor of having a concealed carry weapon is canceled out by the use of a fannypack to carry it.
If you want to use them as storage, use Windows Home Server. It does a great job of pooling small devices and is dead easy to set up. No, I'm not a M$ employee, it's just a good product.
I use old drives for swap space on a dedicated channel - sure not useful until the machine get's loaded - but it's real useful when the machine get loaded. No, I don't like it when a machine swaps, but if it's going to...
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
I usually take the hard drives apart for their magnets. Great for holding geocaches to guardrails!
give them to me lol!
You keep a gun in your fanny pack? Those are two things I never thought I would hear mix...
send em to Africa or SE Asia - I left my 512MB USB drive with a student in Philippines. old tech is much appreciated in poorer regions of the world.
Mongrel News all the news that fits and froths
Take a Dremel or angle grinder to the hard drives, yank the magnets, replace the weak magnets on your fridge with something that will actually hold things in place.
Or you can do what I did: punch a hole through the drive and mount a combination lock to it. Fun for the whole family.
I'm reasonably sure that if they have a serious interest in the contents of your hard drive, the NSA will be able to decrypt it by using a $5 wrench and some duct tape to persuade you to help them.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/disk bs=1k
It hasn't been successfully recovered from, to my knowledge
I did that when wiping some old drives at work, and then I taco'ed the platter, glued on some inductors to make feet, and constructed a shiny, geeky napkin holder.
greed@All_Evils:~#
If you make an image of your platter with an electron microscope you can measure the actual magnetisation of the bit (which is an analog value) on the harddrive and have a good idea of what previous values were. Add to that the error correction mechanisms on every harddrive and you have a good chance to find the data on it before you put all zeroes over it.
Open 40 MB harddisk
Carefully take out read/write head
File off some material off said read/write head
Carefully insert read/write head
Close 1 TB harddisk
Profit
If they want my IM logs that bad, let them have it.
Check out my sysadmin blog!
You could use a small flash drive in place of a CD when you need to distribute copies of whatever -- a Powerpoint, a demo, a document. Just like a CD, don't expect to get it back. Encourage the recipient to re-use it and pass it on. There are plenty of times when data is too big for e-mail, but not so big it would exceed the size of a 64 MB flash drive.
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Bending and flexing the platters will [...]
Might want to be careful with that one. Sometimes the platters are glass or some other non-bendable, but easily shatter-able material. I once bent two platters from one drive and then moved on to the next set. While it only took around 15 minutes to clean up the majority, it's been several months now and I still find the occasional remnant in my living room. That thing exploded.
-- i am jack's amusing sig file
Technology Director
Yoakum ISD
PO Box 737
102 McKinnon
Yoakum, TX 77995
As a South African, I would appreciate you not sending them here, I have enough of the crap / slow / broken-from-being-used-as-a-teething-ring things already. Some of them have devolved from USB/Keyring to Keyring-that-I-can't-remember-whats-on-them. Finally, I would not recommend the SATA drives as keyrings ... especially if you're in the habit of throwing your keys on the glass side table immediately inside the front door.
RTFM is not a radio station.
Yeah, I noticed that the article linked via the original post (which was made by you, thanks!) mentioned that the (un-)helpful BIOS protection was a problem.
Can this be bypassed on all BIOSs?
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
This is not true. Glass was made via a process that made it thicker at the edges of the sheet, which was then cut into a rectangular shape and the thicker side placed at the bottom of the window to help with structural integrity.
This is actually the coolest discovery of my week so far. I can't remember where exactly I learned the 'super-cooled liquid' version; I know my parents talked about it that way when I was a kid, and I know at least one high school science teacher explained it this way. It's a little sad to see it go for one reason: I recall reading a novel where a character had the experience of traveling through time at a highly accelerated rate and seeing lightbulbs 'melt', which always struck me as a really neat visual.
So now I do have a question. . . The super-cooled liquid thing is how I always explained why silicone chips failed over time. --Now I don't get it. Anybody? Why do chips fail? And do they fail when just sitting unused, or is it a property of their semi/conducting electricity?
-FL
[snip]Windows ME.
Yes, that would fall under the general category of "something nasty".
$ make available
And why could dd if=/dev/zero not be recovered from? What's special about newer drives that make it impossible? I seem to recall that some degree of the previous state is still retrievable with fancy things like micron electrsoscopes, or whatever.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
My old 1GB USB MP3 player stopped working as an MP3 player, but still works as a flash drive. It's now living out a happy second career as a bootable recovery OS, plus nerdy party piece.
dban (daryl boot and nuke or similar) is a nice easy, secure wipe for full drives.
For the hard drives, take them apart and remove the magnets. Then use them on your refrigerator; they will be way better than those wussy ones you have on there now. Nothing beats seeing your wife/significant other trying to move one and needing two hands to do it.
The density of recording, AFAIK. In more recent drives also perpendicular recording.
.sig: No such file or directory
Elementary school kids can use 32mb flash drives, kids at the school I work at use them for saving their projects(scratch, powerpoint, screen captures) they do in technology class. While stores want to sell bigger and bigger flash drives for the same price, while schools would rather have small ultra cheap flash drives.
btw: Schools want a $1 flash drive that is a floppy disk replacement not a fashion accessory. At $1 every kid can have one.
Well, this was a high school course. We did more than just that, we were also playing with bread boards and making primitive digital LED number displays, and oh, the EEPROMs...
There we also learned more basic skills, such as taking a motherboard and processor, and adding hard drives, memory, cd-roms, power supplies, heatsinks/fans, network cards, etc;. Half the battle was trying to dig through the crap and find components that worked, and trying to get a machine that would give you the right beeps at POST, and diagnose when it didn't. We shared the room with the Robotics class, and so we also had some limited involvment in maze-solving robots programmed in assembly.
And that was just Comp Engineering. I also had Comp Sci, which was playing around with Object Oriented Turing, Logo, Java, and then a Java based Battle Bot game I forget the name of. A lot of the time, we'd be done early and just read webcomics, or play Liero.
These were courses offered both in Grade 11 and Grade 12, the Grade 12 course obviously being a bit more advanced (I graduated the year after they removed grade 13 in Ontario). I didn't realize until after graduation what a special school that was. It's apparently not as nice as it used to be, the music and CS programs have suffered. Lots of fond memories, though.
What's the value of information that you don't know?