But some people spend a lot of time attempting to hack into other people's computers, on all sorts of scales, apparently, which is why there's a lot of malware out there and AV programs etc. So I don't see why if an individual in a recycling depot came across a computer with an intact HDD in it, he wouldn't be tempted to open it up and investigate the drive.
Hmm, I'm unconvinced.
If the computer is working when you recycle it then simply reformat the disk drive, once that's done it requires major technical expertise and time and money to recover data.
If the computer isn't working then is anyone really going to check through all their pile of non-working computers to extract the disk drives, find another computer with a suitable interface and then see if they can extract any useful data?
Passwords, even those kept in a browser (which I don't) are encrypted so you can't just read them off the disk.
But NOT a Quick Format
9 years old? Take the hard drive out and sell it on ebay for spares or.... WEEE it. Its beyond economic repair alas . . . .
Which is probably already your greatest risk. ;-(
I do, they see too many of them and would only be bothered is any potential value they might have being sold for reuse (or scrap).
For me (and potentially many on a DIY group) would consider 'just throwing away' a laptop because it was 'dead' as a bit of sacrilege.
Most PC's / laptops contain stuff like RAM, HDD and even WiFi cards that even if you don't want or need, would be of use to others (especially free). ;-)
But as others have said, *if* the HDD is removable (and they aren't always, especially on a low power netbook) putting it in a cheap caddy gives you a nice backup drive or you could even install Linux on is as a portable emergency boot disk (that would probably boot on any PC).
And I'm sure it's not just me that even if I had decided that something was beyond economical repair, I might be interested to see how it came apart and / or what it contained.
Also, if you did want to give the HDD away, with or without the caddy (also as mentioned elsewhere), running something like DBAN over it (even the automatic settings) wouldn't pretty well deny anyone (inc the NSA) from recovering *any* data from it (more so if you gave it away with Linux on it). ;-)
If it's an SSD, running something like the 'Wipe Data' option from the free 'EaseUS Partition Master'.
Cheers, T i m
Quick Format or Long Format, neither "Erases".
The concept of "format" is from long ago, when the disk layout could be "refreshed" by writing concentric tracks from end to end. Today, the format (the sync wedges) are written once at the factory, and cannot be touched in the field. Thus, modern disks only have a "write sector" semantic. Only an old fashioned disk would accept a format command (it's a command, that back in those days if you stopped it, the disk was likely ruined).
You can write a modern disk end to end with "dd.exe" (disk dump).
DBAN works.
Secure Erase works.
You can even use Windows "diskpart" and the "clean all" command. That writes end to end, and is as good as "dd" but without the getting-hands-dirty thing. You use your Technician computer, cable up the drive to be erased, and *double check* you're erasing the correct disk.
I use diskpart "clean all" before experiments where I need to understand what parts of the disk are being written. By placing a background pattern of all-zeros, it makes it easier to see changes later on.
If the disk is several terabytes, it might take a few hours for the "clean all" to complete. You can use Task Manager and the I/O Read and I/O Write columns (add them), to see how commands like that are progressing.
Paul
But it still takes a *lot* of work to get anything useful back, I still doubt that the game is worth the candle.
That write up was a bit too technical for most people (but geek interesting...)
Don't bin it.
In a few years, these Atom N270 netbooks will become something of a technical curio for future purchasers of 'retro' history.
If you have a look at eBay, folks are chasing ideas of selling a working one for £50. Personally, I wouldn't give more than a fiver (I have a similar Atom CPU driven Toshiba NB100 which cost me that much, alas equally as gutless - but a neat looking curio, which is why I have it in the pile of tqt).
Some kid, currently playing around with Raspberry Pi's might appreciate it for a 'terminal', and might learn a lot getting it to boot.
Pity there isn't a 'donate to learn' website for gifting old scrap tech
- everyone is either more interested in 'does it work?' with disposals, or trying to extract value.
The other day I came across an eBay seller, that had many, many items from stripped BT set top boxes, advertised on the off chance that someone was missing some really esoteric pieces. I can understand a requirement for a broken main circuit board. But he was advertising things far deep in the guts of it, plastics and minor mechanical bits. Things that just don't fail. Pointless stripping.
Er, him trying to extract value, and possible clueless.
Hey, good luck on that....
Some people can't not. ;-)
That's good (I have several). I have an Asus EEC PC4G by my foot as I type. ;-)
I have several MSI Winds and a couple of Fujitsu Q550's. ;-)
Yup, I have used them where I might use a RPi but where I don't want it headless to start with.
That's a good idea. ;-)
When I was at primary school and Mum was a cleaner / swimming teacher / welfare lady / teaching assistant ... she would often come home with stuff she had been given with the 'I know your Tim likes to take stuff to bits, could you give him this radio / cassette player / torch / electric toy ...'. Some of them were returned cleaned up and fixed. Battery wire soldered back on, ground leg of a screened transistor can cut, de-sulphated battery terminals cleaned up / replaced etc etc.
I leaned a lot and got my first Saturday job in a 'we buy anything type shop sorting out all the electrical / mechanical stuff. Buy in a record player with a broken pickup wire or drive belt, I'd fix / replace and he'd sell as working.
Yup.
Except (and I'm not saying in this case), people buy all sorts of misc crap for making things like art projects and colleagues.
It's only because people are willing to list (and often re-list) some of this stuff and often for not much more than the postage that supply those odd cases and save stuff from going into landfill.
Ground steel rods salvaged from a dried up ink-jet printer might be used on a 3d printer etc.
Cheers. T i m
And yet the OP says he used it to run Photoshop. That must be a verrrrry old version ?
Photoshop 6.0, not sure how old that is but serves purpose.
If you can get £30 for a black market working cc number and supporting info, and there are automated tools to scan drives for saleable financial and ID data, do you not suppose its worth a malactors time to swap the pile of drives on the test rig from timE to time?
I take the simple view that if the actual disc isn't in the drive, they can't do anything with it. It's easy enough to extract the HDD from the computer, and also easy enough either to destroy it physically or open it up to remove the spinning rust. I actually quite enjoy opening them up - quite therapeutic in a way - and as I've said up-thread, there are some useful magnets in there.
As a general rule that is true for most values of "they" (as always with these things - know your enemy - what will keep an opportunist ID thief away may not deter a nation state security agency)!
Yup, I will often dismantle them for much the same reason, and they provide a handy source of strong magnets and decorative desk coasters :-)
I was just cautioning against those that simply discard drives with the logic that no one will be bothered to go looking. That is not a safe assumption, and also these days a potential GDPR fail depending on what is on the disk.
The only time I have done that is:
1) When the drive is faulty so no real way to erase it. 2) If the drive is very small capacity *and* an interface that was unlikely to be any use to me / others (ST506, PATA/IDE, SCSI etc). You sometimes find some old kit can use a particular 'old tech' drive and do working items are still sought after. I sold a load of 20GB SCSI drives (out of a commercial RAID array) to people on eBay. 3) If it was particularly noisy.Anything else and especially anything SATA and bigger than 64G will go in many of my swappable PC drive slots and allow me to try all sorts of (often Linux based) utilities, like NAS's or TVHeadend, even if they are only the boot (rather than Data) drives.
If they are 500G up then they can go into external caddies and be useful dumping ground for surplus data or as staging points for system transfers / testing / loaning etc
I guess if you aren't involved in PC(type) hardware and / or have loads of spare cash then I can see why you might not want to bother creating a DBAN boot drive or std formatting / overwriting with another OS, you have finished with it and just want it out of your life (so many people have a Zen / OCD 'it must go' thing).
A mate was like that with a new / unused / unwanted Sky TV box. I took it to bit and extracted the 500GB SATA drive (that only had 'hours' of use on it) and that's currently running W10/64 in my 'play' PC.
But then I guess I could easily throw away a valuable vase because I have no interest in chinaware. I might however first check if it *is* valuable and if so, give it to someone or sell it (I wouldn't just smash it up).
Cheers, T i m
The last HDD I dismantled had already seen an earlier life in a laptop, and was in a USB caddy. Something failed. It stopped working. I don't know whether it was the electronics in the caddy or the drive itself. As I'd already had my money's worth out of it, it wasn't a very high capacity drive and I had a couple of similar drives in USB caddies anyway, I CBA to find out why it wasn't working, and rather than run the possibility of someone else getting it to work again and possibly getting information useful to them from it, I stripped it.
I find tapping it with a 15lb sledge hammer also works :-)
Yup, I have found a good market for floppy drives in the past.
I am kind of spoilt for that class of drive - there was a time when customers wanted new laptops, it was hard to get SSD based ones from the manufacturers direct - or at least at sensible prices. So I would quite often supply a laptop and an upgrade to SSD from new. (cloning the shipped drive onto a SSD). As a result I have a stack of 40 or so 500GB HDDs that are to all intents new that I don't have much use for.
That deals with a couple of em :-)
One has to decide on how reusable its going to be. For most applications, if its not SSD these days, then there is only limited scope for my own system or a clients one. There are a few cases where spinning rust is still handy, but not ones I often need to deal with.
I would not reuse a normal desktop drive in a NAS application that mattered - even if its RAID 5 or 10 etc and the data is going to be safe, its not worth the business interruption hassle etc if it fails.
Yeah, I have a stack of 5.25" HDDs as well. If building up a play PC I would probably go for one of my salvaged 120GB SSDs - perhaps with spinning rust as well if it needs space.
Define valuable? Its normally what someone is willing to pay. Needless to say your second hand Ming dynasty 500GB Seagate Barracuda, is unlikely to anything comparable to the porcelain variety.
Ok.
No spare caddy in yer 'electronics parts' store? ;-)
A mate give me a drive in a caddy to make into a Linux boot drive for him and after several failed attempts I put his drive in one of my caddies, installed Linux and gave it back to him (along with his crap caddy). 'How much do I owe you, especially for the caddy?' ... nothing mate, just enjoy. ;-)
See, I don't get that. Daughter paid £400 for a Corsa ~8 years ago and with 205,000 miles on the clock it's still hanging in there (just). Even if she picked up a replacement car, she wouldn't just dump the Corsa, till it actually gave up, irrespective of her getting her moneys worth or not?
Yeahbut (and still playing devils advocate etc), it's not it's financial worth but it's functional worth, if not to you to someone else. Reduce, re-use, recycle?
Quick swap over into a different caddy ... some are 'tool free' these days (and remembering we are in a d-i-y group etc ...). ;-)
No, I get it, if that's how you see things (and is your right etc), still from an environmental POV, it would still have been better to carry on using something that may have been perfectly ok (the drive itself).
When you opened it up, did you consider of the effort that went into the designing such a thing, the use of materials, the clean room assembly, the fineness of the parts yet the reliability they are?
Maybe it's just because this sort of stuff has been part of my life for so do long and originally everything was very expensive so you had to make very good use of everything you could, makes me not want to 'waste' such things if I can.
If you make use of the platter and magnet then I guess that's the 'Re-use' bit but where did the rest of it end up?
Cheers, T I fm
p.s. Don't get me wrong here, 'of course' you can do what you like with any of it. ;-)
p.p.s. To see people 'smashing stuff up' when they could be put to good use makes me feel similar to what most people felt when Sadam started blowing up oil wells. ;-(
As long as it then goes to the recyclers ...
Cool.
Yeah, I have done similar but might give them the original drive in a caddy for them to use as a backup (but I wasn't doing it commercially).
My WHS has been running on 3 x 500Gb Hitachi drives for many years now and I'd love to build a full RAID server out of (low power / low noise) laptop drives. I have two Buffalo Terastations that would take
4 x SATA drives each but don't have 8 off 500G drives doing nothing ... (And a 3d printer to deal with the 3.5 to 2.5" adaptor trays. ;-)Sure, but assuming you aren't awash with the things like you are ... and assuming you don't have a USB Linux boot drive (for S&G's or as a tool etc) than that's a genuine use? Only needs to be 32G and anything bigger would be a result. ;-)
Sure.
But for me it's the affordability (of something to play with). Like, I'd like to build a multi SATA drive RAID NAS, laptop drives are quiet and low power and would all easily go in the smallest of cases. If I had to but ~1.5TB worth of retail drives for that then that would add to the cost.
Understood, but for domestic / hobby / play needs ...
Sure, as I have done with many of the 64GB SSD's that same in a bunch of slimline Atom powered shuttles I bought cheap off ebay.
Of course. But the point is that there can often be someone wiling to pay handsomely for something we might consider 'junk'.
You sometime see that on the TV antiques shows, vase bought for £2 at a boot sale, valued at £2000.
No, but the 15 (good ones, of the 20 I had) or so 20GB HH 3.5" SCSI(1) drives sold for ~£20 each and that was quite handy. 'Not worth the effort' for a man of your means of course but I was doing all of it as part of my hobby and trying to find good homes for this stuff (or it would all have gone in the skip, had I not bought it as scrap).
Part of my 'fun' was running the Adaptec LL format / test utility and then a higher level test and seeing how many came out good.
Cheers, T i m
p.s. The old company 'Kinsman' telephone exchange was going into the skip and I offered them 20 quid for it. Some of the PCB's were quite 'sought after' and found some people very happy to come and buy such off me. I did the same with a complete PDP 11, 6 x VT100's, a Lineprinter, two Decwriters, two disk drives and 20 diskpacks. ;-)
Drop me your address by email, and I will see what I can do :-)
Perhaps, although my desire to "play" with stuff is diminished somewhat by doing similar all day. It has to be something I *really* want to do.
64s I find a bit small now - even a basic install of windows and a few apps will fill that fairly quickly after a few updates.Yeah the problem I normally find is that the niche stuff I have that would be worth selling is also the stuff that I might have a use for myself one day... (although I may be kidding myself - looking at my collection of SCART leads and clever switch boxes!)
I do have a bunch of SCSI drives - but mainly retired from my own systems and I will hang onto them in case I want to resurrect and old Amiga or similar.
:-) Yup I was eyeing up the Nikon auto slide feeder for my non working scanner the other day, they seem to go for decent amounts on ebay at the mo.
(although not too keen on trekking to the post office at the mo for obvious reasons)
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