What do you do with your old external HDD'S ?

TonyGamble · Aug 23, 2020

Londoner here.

As part of my lockdown clearout I have come across a box of old external HDDs.

I have kept them as a precaution that some life threatening file has gone awol after two decades of upgrades but now feel confident that danger has passed.

There are probably about six and they are probably mostly 2tb.

Yes, they have data on them.

I could get a heavy hammer, bash the daylights out of them and consign them to the rubbish bin.

The problem about passing them on is that I really ought to 'clean' them and when I set Acronis on one of them it looked as if it was going to take days. I am told that simply formatting is not secure.

Then what do I do with them. I cannot imagine eBay will produce much and I really don't want to get into arguments with people claiming they found a bad sector.

I've asked a local charity and not got any real suggestion.

Does anyone here have any ideas?

To repeat - I live in London. So any reply needs to remember that.

Thanks in advance.

Tony

Austinian · Aug 23, 2020

TonyGamble said:
Londoner here.

As part of my lockdown clearout I have come across a box of old external HDDs.

I have kept them as a precaution that some life threatening file has gone awol after two decades of upgrades but now feel confident that danger has passed.

There are probably about six and they are probably mostly 2tb.

Yes, they have data on them.

I could get a heavy hammer, bash the daylights out of them and consign them to the rubbish bin.

The problem about passing them on is that I really ought to 'clean' them and when I set Acronis on one of them it looked as if it was going to take days. I am told that simply formatting is not secure.

Then what do I do with them. I cannot imagine eBay will produce much and I really don't want to get into arguments with people claiming they found a bad sector.

I've asked a local charity and not got any real suggestion.

Does anyone here have any ideas?

When I disposed of useless old PATA internal HDDs, I bashed them with a claw hammer a few times, then drilled holes in their circuit boards. Then I put them in sealed plastic bags (to avoid contaminating the landfills with heavy metals) and dumped 'em in the trash.

If I had external drives, I'd have taken the bare drive out of the case and done the same.

I've seen documentaries on the crude so-called "recycling" that happens in some countries where it's outsourced to, and the human damage to the "recyclers" from the process. No thanks.

TonyGamble said:
To repeat - I live in London. So any reply needs to remember that.

I honestly don't know why that would matter; is there a London-specific problem?

TonyGamble · Aug 23, 2020

"I honestly don't know why that would matter; is there a London-specific problem?"

No. I was maybe expecting a more charity focussed suggestion. Such as drop them in at **** next to Grand Central Station where they clean the data and recondition the drives so they can be sent to deprived children in Bangalore.

Not much good for someone living in England.

We used to throw mobile phones away. Now, in the UK anyway, we are encouraged to send them somewhere where they can be reconditioned and sent to the third world.

A shame we can't do that with HHDs.

Tony

Austinian · Aug 23, 2020

TonyGamble said:
"I honestly don't know why that would matter; is there a London-specific problem?"

No. I was maybe expecting a more charity focussed suggestion. Such as drop them in at **** next to Grand Central Station where they clean the data and recondition the drives so they can be sent to deprived children in Bangalore.

Not much good for someone living in England.

We used to throw mobile phones away. Now, in the UK anyway, we are encouraged to send them somewhere where they can be reconditioned and sent to the third world.

A shame we can't do that with HHDs.

My thought would be that the cost of true recycling would be too high; lots of labor involved. What I've seen end up happening is so-called "recycling" in third-world places; obviously poor people sitting around rubbish heaps of old electronics, heating up circuit boards with butane torches to melt off the valuable metals in the crudest way--and breathing the smoke and vapors from that process.

RDKirk · Aug 23, 2020

[No message]

CameraCarl · Aug 23, 2020

In the USA Western Digital will recycle the drives and give you a token discount on new drives. WD claims they will wipe your data first. You might see if they offer something similar in the UK. Before this, I used to drill straight through the drive destroying the drive and its contents.

Billiam29 · Aug 23, 2020

If you have the required tools, I’ll suggest taking at least one of the drives apart for the magnets.

The two or three hard drives I’ve taken apart had fairly healthy (rare Earth?) magnets in them. They were small so you weren’t going to pick up an anvil with them or anything. Relative to their size though, they were pretty strong. IMO pulling a pair of these out of drive is probably worth the effort to have them on hand for future use. I’ve used mine to find the exact location of nails within drywall on a couple of occasions.

NOTE: These magnets are strong enough that they can potentially “bite” pretty bad if you get your finger in between two of them snapping together. Be careful.

TonyGamble · Aug 23, 2020

Thanks for the assorted ideas folk.

Please keep them coming.

Tony

plain text · Aug 23, 2020

Try one of these -

https://www.ecosia.org/search?tt=waterfox&q=%22Computer+recycling%22+%2BLondon

*************

Free Computer Recycling Center London - IT Disposal Service

Computer Recycling London provides the best solution for IT equipment recycling, secure data destruction, mobile phone & telecom recycling for business org.

www.londonscomputerrecycling.co.uk

Computer Recycling Service

CPR Brings the truley enviromentally friendly way to recycle old computers to UK Businesses and personal users

www.cprcomputerrecycling.co.uk

etc

Patco · Aug 23, 2020

Billiam29 said:
If you have the required tools, I’ll suggest taking at least one of the drives apart for the magnets.

Yep, I have a good collection of fridge magnets.

A word of warning, though: the platters in many (all?) 2 1/2" drives are made of glass, so smashing them to destroy the data after opening the drive may not be the best idea unless proper precautions are taken:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_...ba_MK1403MAV_-_broken_glass_platter-93375.jpg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive_platter

Hosebag · Aug 23, 2020

I took two of mine out and shot them with a .300 Win Mag rifle. They make nice targets.

skyglider · Aug 23, 2020

Billiam29 said:
If you have the required tools, I’ll suggest taking at least one of the drives apart for the magnets.

+1

Absolutely. Salvage the magnets. There are valuable STRONG rare earth neodymium magnets in a hard drive. Nice thing is that the magnets are glued to metal plates that have mounting holes in them. Don't remove the magnets from the metal plates since the mounting holes come in really handy. The magnets are really, really strong!

You will need a torx screwdriver set to disassemble a hard drive.

In the process of extracting the magnets, you automatically make the drive unusable. So there's a double benefit.

And as Billiam29 said, be careful about pinching your finger between a magnet and a metal object. Pretty painful. Don't ask me how I know that ;-) .

Sky

drynn · Aug 23, 2020

Your local recycling centre at the council tip will have a 'small electricals' section. If you are concerned about the data on the drives, use your hammer first. The small electricals are sent for recycling i.e. destroy and recover metals, plastics etc; not to land-fill.

If you want to give them away for reuse, you can do a full reformat (check that your OS does a proper data overwrite), or there are several free programs that will help you wipe the data to recognised standards - again, overwriting is essential.

a_c_skinner · Aug 24, 2020

Formatting won't destroy data on HDDs as it is a high level format not a low level format. The actual content is left unchanged. There are lots of secure delete programs but you will need to leave it running for ages because it takes a long time to write to every bit on a big disk. It may be possible to recover fragmentary data even after multiple over writes BUT this is pretty much theoretical if you are not the CIA. I'd not worry about giving away a drive I'd overwritten repeatedly with CCleaner for eg. I'd not give away a drive without doing it.

2Tb drives are big enough to be useful in making duplicate backups. I can still get all of my data on three. It isn't convenient, single big drives to backup my main volume is much easier but you can't have too many backups. Smaller ones secure delete or destroy.

TonyGamble · Aug 24, 2020

Thanks drynn.

My reluctance to the second option is the length of time the overwrite would take. Have you a feel for what it would take for a 2tb drive?

Tony

TonyGamble · Aug 24, 2020

Thanks Andrew,

I had not thought of CCleaner. I'll set that loose on a drive and see what happens.

I already have four external HDDs on my main PC. One is for my 'work'. One is a mirrored backup of that. The other two are Acronis and Windows History. For the first two I use Goodsync which I love. I am starting to run out of USB ports so am reluctant to introduce those old 2tb drives.

Tony

a_c_skinner · Aug 24, 2020

You'll have to connect one up and try it. Most programs give you a choice of how many times you want it overwriting. CCleaner offers "zero out" or 7 time or 35 times. The more the longer. You'll just have to connect up and see how long it takes. Just guessing 1Tb about half a day on USB3, longer on USB2

a_c_skinner · Aug 24, 2020

I'd use them for off line backups. A mirrored drive isn't worthwhile protection if that is all you've got. A plugged in backup is no backup.

--
Andrew Skinner

ajscullard · Aug 24, 2020

Sure, it does take a long time to securely wipe a hard drive, but why is that a concern? They've been lying around for years so a few more days won't be a problem.

If time is your criterion, open 'em up and smash 'em. Throw them away.

If you want to sell them or give them away then take the time to overwrite them (I used O&O SafeErase on old 500Gb drives and it took 4 or 5 hours).

It may take a long time but I don't see why you would worry, as you can still use your computer while this is happening, or run the erase overnight.

drynn · Aug 24, 2020

a_c_skinner said:
Formatting won't destroy data on HDDs as it is a high level format not a low level format. The actual content is left unchanged.

Win10 certainly does 'destroy' data inasmuch as using the correct formatting (parameters) version allows multiple passes with overwrites. The more passes, the longer it takes. Singles passes overwrites with zeroes, subsequent passes uses random characters. I have no idea how long it would take to do six 2TB drives.

Physical destruction is quicker and more thorough :-D

What do you do with your old external HDD'S ?

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