How do you dispose your old Hard Drives?
Mon 2009/12/14 11:17 JST
There were times, when Hard Disk Drives were small and expensive. I do remember myself hogging megabytes of free space, burning CDs and DVDs. Now it's much more convenient to buy a NAS and few 1.5 Terabyte HDDs, slap them on the network and forget about endless DVDs, for now...
On the other hand what to do with old Hard Drives? Crushing poor pies of electronics, putting an end to their misery, is always an option. But I came up with something more subtle and involving.
A modified picture frame from IKEA turns an old Hard Disk Drive into a fine tabletop decoration.
Would be fun to do that to a working HDD and have it sitting on your desk as an external HDD. I tend to DBAN my hard drives and just throw them out. If I can't pull them apart that is :3
Making it an external HDD certainly can be done, but the whole point of a picture frame is seeing it's internals .
Next on the list is connecting of some sort of 12v. battery pack and a button to spin the Hard Drive. Anyone has an idea on how to do it?
I've never disposed of any HDDs yet. '~'
But i must say that that looks wicked good!
I call in the almighty trash can!
Not a great idea, I must say. Almost any HDD can be ravaged for bits and pieces of information, unless the plates are physically destroyed. There are blokes that go dumpster diving for the old HDDs, and guess what might be on them. Browsing logs, doc files, Credit card ##, your favorite loli-hentai - oh, officials will certainly love that.
That's why smart people invented encryption.
And if you are concerned about your cpu being hogged by the encryption/decryption, you can do like me: encrypt only stuff that matters - financial info, doc files, loli-hentai collection, etc.
(and virtual memory, of course, but hopefully your OS already does this for you).
Have you heard of Drobo? You can use your older drives and combine them to squeeze out some extra life :-) (http://www.drobo.com/)
well, I take it to the backyard and whack it with a baseball bat
I've not had to dispose of any but I really like your idea of putting a picture frame around it.
I bet there are a bunch of nifty things you can come up with for this sort of thing.
My oldest one still in service, talk about veteran!
To completely destroy all traces of data on a hard disk to prevent anyone from retrieving anything, do the following:
1. Run an industrial strength magnet several times over the hard disk.
2. Use a sledge hammer to smash the hard disk repeatedly.
3. Throw it into a fire.
The three enemies of data, magnetism, impact and heat.
I open them up, remove the platters, drill a tiny hole near the edge of each platter, put some mono-filament (fishing line) through the hole, tie the mono-filament to a small piece of wood like a dowel or something, hang it up and believe it or not make it becomes an excellent wind chime.
Of course I have a small stash of 5.25" platters as well as the 3.5" so I get a wider range of sound.
Recycling. If I don't use it as a spare drive in the new computer, I send it to recycling.