Do you keep your old hard drive?

[Mac'nCheese]

Just wondering since my time machine used external hard drive appears to be unusable, how long do people keep their old hard drives for? I have a bunch, for various reasons unused, in a fire safe but was wondering how long I would keep them for. I can't even imagine why I would need to find something on one of them since all the info is always passed on to any new computer and new external drive. Anything I deleted from an old computer, well, I doubt I would even remember those pictures or files or even where they were buried on the old drive. On the other hand, it doesn't hurt to save them. What do you do?

 

[Mr. McMac]

I never keep old obsolete hard dives around. Before I dispose them, I delete the partition and then I cut them in half on my band saw destroying the platters and circuit board so nobody could possibly recover any of my data.

 

[JesterJJZ]

I do secure erases and sell them on ebay. I get quite a bit back when I trasition to larger drives.

 

[MCAsan]

grind them up and make 6TB units.

 

[rgarjr]

I don't really have any old hard drives laying around.

 

[velocityg4]

I keep them. When a client is discarding an older computer that just needs a hard drive but meets my minimum criteria of usable. I'll put in one of my drives, do a 7 pass wipe, install the Windows version it is licensed for, install basic free apps like Libreoffice and updates. Then donate it to charity.

Drives with hard to get interfaces I keep for replacements on vintage computers.

 

[poiihy]

I would put them in an enclosure and use them as an external hard drive. Or put them in a multi-bay enclosure and use them in a RAID set.

If they dont work then I would take it apart of course! You can do a lot with them. They have magnets, shiny disks, voice coil actuator, and a nice aluminum casing. You can turn the actuator into a speaker! Just connect an amplifier to the two connections of the voice coil and play! Attach a cup to the head and it sounds better.
Or you can trash the head and make useof the magnets for something else. Disks you can do whatever you want... just be careful as some disks are glass and if they are glass you shouldn' use them because they can shatter into a thousand shards and get everywhere.

 

[glenthompson]

Depends on the size and what's on there. When we replaced our spinning drives for SSDs we kept the old drives since they were larger and could be used for backups. Same for the old drives on my NAS.

Old drives I want to trash I usually pull apart to get the magnets. Very powerful and useful.

 

[0983275]

Always.

I keep them until they fail, I also have few spare PC parts lying around, enough to build couple and sell them if I can be bothered to.

 

[lowendlinux]

I always keep them you never know when one will come in handy

 

[matreya]

I throw them out so that future anthropologists can study them

 

[MRrainer]

I've thrown away all my old (pre-Apple) SCSI-drives.
Most of them started to malfunction the last time I had them powered-on anyway - and that was years ago.

At work, we've got a container for our old server-harddrives - I throw mine in as well.
They get to be destructed professionally.

 

[IHelpId10t5]

I never keep old obsolete hard dives around. Before I dispose them, I delete the partition and then I cut them in half on my band saw destroying the platters and circuit board so nobody could possibly recover any of my data.

Exactly! HDDs are cheap so keep them locked away for a few years as a long-term archive. Then, eventually you can just wipe them using software and then physically destroy them with a drill, saw, or commercial shredder.

 

[JesterJJZ]

Exactly! HDDs are cheap so keep them locked away for a few years as a long-term archive. Then, eventually you can just wipe them using software and then physically destroy them with a drill, saw, or commercial shredder.

Except you gotta spin them up once or twice a year to keep them from going bad. They do, do that.