What do you do with old hard drives?

PretzelB · Post by **PretzelB** » Mon Nov 19, 2007 7:04 am

I was just looking at picking up some new SATA drives and I realized that my collection of old IDE drives is getting out of hand. Any suggestions on what to do with them? They all appear to work fine but I can't imagine selling old IDE 80gb or 120gb hard drives for very much. I'd be happy to donate them to a charity if possible. I just don't want them to end up in a landfill if there is a better option.

bendit · Post by **bendit** » Mon Nov 19, 2007 7:44 am

if you live in a city with craiglist, sell them. there are many folks out there that buy STUFF, any stuff, provided it's priced to sell.

Bluefront · Post by **Bluefront** » Mon Nov 19, 2007 8:13 am

Save them....they make great spacers for building computers, fitting 3.5" drive bays, sizing, etc.

BratWalnut · Post by **BratWalnut** » Mon Nov 19, 2007 8:56 am

I don't know how many you have, but if I were you I'd take a couple of them for document back up (scan them if you haven't already), music or pictures eventually. I'd put on in a fire resistant safe and forget it there. Send another one in the retail box of one of the new ones to your parent's house, and leave one encripted somewhere at work. That's three, can be more if you have lots of pictures or music to save, specially RAW files or lossess audio (you'll need a lot of storage for that, good that you have many drives). They can't be updated, but there are some things that are so valuabe that it is not worth the risk of losing them anyway.

After doing that, you can begin selling them, I think.

frostedflakes · Post by **frostedflakes** » Mon Nov 19, 2007 10:19 am

I thought this was kind of cool.

http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview ... id=2028439

The guy makes some amazing looking roses out of the hard drive platters. I think occasionally he is looking for platters, might even be willing to pay you a bit for those old hard drives.