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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.
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!
Load them up with porn and give them to random people anonymously. They will thank you for it!
Monstar L
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?
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 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
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!
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. :(
Blend it!
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
Do what I did to my old printer that kept telling me to "PC load letter".
Load 'letter' sized paper into the paper cassette tray and continue?
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!
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.
I'm sorry, but that's just not how we do things around here. If the printer is doing anything other than printing your document, the correct solution is to wander aimlessly away and hope someone else will eventually fix it. As an added bonus, you get to tell everyone the printer is broken, and that's why you weren't able to get any work done today.
A) Install USB linux on one of them. They come in handy when repairing computers. B) Pass them to close friends, or colleagues at work, they'll give it to their children. C) Give it to your neighbor.
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.
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 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.
How fortunate! Around here the traditional tactic is to press the print button again, twenty more times at the least...
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.
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
My first programming classes were supervised (not taught) by the guy that ran the Windows computer lab. He was Mac-only, and hadn't written a line of code in his life. Basically, he handed the 5 of us in the class books and said "Just show me something cool at the end of the day every day, and I'll pass you".
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
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.
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
Donating, schmonating. We're at the start of Depression #2, and every penny counts. I earn around $300 each month just selling old stuff like videos, books, and gadgets. Amazon is good for earning a higher price, but it does require patience. Ebay is better if you want to get rid of stuff right now:
- List it for 99 cents and $5 ship/handling
- Or 1 cent and $6 ship/handling
Please note I said S&H not postage. Shipping is for the ~$3 postage, but the "handling" covers your personal labor (you don't work for free) and the outrageous fees ebay charges (they don't work for free either). Someone will buy your item because there's always someone looking for old items, and you'll make around a dollar profit for each flash or hard drive sold. Possibly more if the demand is high.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
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...
Obviously your users haven't discovered the "send the job to every printer on site" trick yet. Works like a charm and I get to recycle stacks and stacks of orphaned documents.
If you feel the need, but so far, no one has even done zeros.
http://16systems.com/zero/
Check out my sysadmin blog!
In addition, because of the ratio used, two sheets of one size fit exactly onto the next size up, so fitting multiple small pages onto a larger sheet is also a doddle. This is useful for saving paper when printing long documents, or for example when printing four A6 invitations on a sheet of A4.
Just an FYI, the American 8.5*11 paper standard does the same thing. A letter sized page is called ANSI A. Two side by side form a sheet that is 11*17 is ANSI B, which you may be familiar with as the wide computer paper. It is also called "ledger" or "tabloid". Two ANSI B sheets, side by side form an ANSI C sheet, two Cs form a D and two Ds form an ANSI E. ANSI Es are used for wall sized maps, and correspond to the metric A0. Unfortunately, the aspect ratio doesn't match that from a step up/down, however it does match the aspect ratio for two steps up or down. Thus it is easy to scale a four to a page layout.
I wish we would ditch the American standard here in the Great White North, but our biggest trading partner is the US, and since they're still in the horse and buggy era when it comes to measuring systems and since they outnumber us ten to one, we need to play along.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
"Thumb Drive Drive - Do you have old thumb drives (otherwise known as USB Memory Sticks) at your office or home that you don't use anymore? We're collecting these drives to share with the organizations we work with. They can be used in hundreds of useful ways by: * Teachers * Students * Relief Camp Workers Please keep sending them in to Inveneo here and we'll make sure they get out to people and organizations who can use them well: Inveneo 972 Mission Street 5th Floor San Francisco, CA 94103"
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
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.
Unfortunately, I can't share the scripts. And they wouldn't be of much use, either, because of the huge differences amongst systems. Slackware != Ubuntu != CentOS != OS X, etc
And I must say up front that it wasn't originally my idea. I only know the person who showed it to me (thanks, EW!).
I can explain an overview on how to set up:
1) Identify how your machine (OS/distro) identifies USB Devices. If they always come up as, say, '/media/USBDISK', you may be gold. Some systems will replace USBDISK with the formatted name of the drive. Simple solution: format all of your drives for this with the same name.
2) Find out how your drive handles startup scripts (is it Linux /etc/init.d/, or OS X launchd?), and how to always ensure the script gets run at boot (priority levels, chkconfigs, this is all different based upon system).
3) Have one script (say, checkUSB.sh) that forces an attempt at doing a mount, and then does a simple -f (bash) test to see if a file is present. ie, 'mount /dev/sdc1 /media/USBDISK; if [ -f /media/USBDISK/checkUSB.sh ]; then do_something; fi'. Depending on the system, you may not have to worry about doing the mount manually. Some OS's will have things automount before your script runs. That is a very happy, very sane environment to work with :]
4) All I have 'checkUSB.sh' do is copy a second shell script down from the drive. So, on every USBDISK, there is a shell script called 'install.sh'. The contents of this script can vary by machine (ie, my DNS flashkey's install.sh does different things than my firewall flashkey's install.sh). At this point, checkUSB.sh should call install.sh (if you are anal, you can do md5 checksums on the transfer to ensure it was copied correctly -- important for a safe/secure/important environment).
5) install.sh is where all the magic happens. The contents of this script varies, but it usually involves performing atomic moves (based upon success and checksums) to ensure everything happens or nothing happens. For example, almost all of my keys change the network configuration, so I include a new ifconfig file on the flash key. The process may work like this: move old ifconfig to ifconfig.old, md5sum the ifconfig on the flashkey, move ifconfig from flashkey to machine, perform md5sum. If md5sums match, move on to next file in script. If md5sums do not match, move old back to original (for all files) and note failure somewhere on the machine. You can also put in system beeps if you'd like. Once all files are transferred and md5sums confirmed, delete all original files.
6) At the end of the script, you should halt the machine from booting (it needs to boot with fresh files). I prefer to do a shutdown -h, as this will ensure to me that the data was read off the flash key. If you do a restart, you'll need to know that the machine went down and up (and finished copying), which is hard to do with a headless machine on a rack. If the machine goes fully down (and the power out), you'll know the script ran to completion. Otherwise, the machine can be put in a continual restart state.
good luck and let me know if your system works!
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
"Since anything you're taught about computers is mostly obsolete in a few years..."
You're not a programmer, are you? I ask because no programmer would ever say that.
The C programming language came out in 72, and C++ came a few years later. Both are in the top three most popular programming languages "based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third party vendors" and they make up 25% out of the top 20 languages in the list. Although the number one language, Java, makes up 19%, it "derives much of its syntax from C and C++" and Java came out in 1995.
Other sources say C is still responsible for nearly 50% of new open source projects, followed by Java with 28%.
So even if you took a programming class 30 years ago it would still very much apply today.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
However, be advised that this may affect the resale value.