Overwritten.net
Community => General Discussion => Topic started by: gpw11 on Sunday, June 01, 2008, 09:40:47 PM
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Do you guys just throw them out? I have my parent's old one, and have no idea what they used to store on that thing, so I'm a little reluctant to just toss it and have some low life garbage man somehow be able to fish their visa number out of that bitch (as unlikely as it is). I'd just open it up, but no torx screwdriver (or whatever the hell that propriety head is).
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I don't think I've ever physically thrown out a drive for that very reason. All my old unused or dead ones are lying around here somewhere.
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I actually have two old drives sitting in my basement right now. Haven't really thought of what to do with them.
If it makes you feel any better gpw, a good bulk of our computer waste in America is shipped to third world countries. I don't know how many "low life garbage men" they have at the Ivory Coast.
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Is that assuming I properly dispose of electronics or does it account for the fact I just bury them in the trash?
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Actually, even the "responsible" disposal of electronics is often dumped in these places. That is, unless something has changed in the past year, which is when I last looked into this sort of thing.
But apparently scrounging through massive dumps of old electronics for minute amounts of precious metals is an awful existence. For many of the electronics they set them on fire to extract the metals, which releases terrible chemicals into the air.
But it's easy to talk about it as I sit here on my fucking laptop contributing to the problem. Ignorance is bliss, unfortunately.
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If you disassemble a hard drive, you'll find a little bit of ferrofluid inside. Ferrofluids do cool things when placed near magnets.
Incidentally, you'll also find a powerful magnet inside your hard drive.
(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d8/Ferrofluid_close.jpg)
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I've never discarded a hard drive, but if I were to I'd run dban on it first.
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Or just take the easy route:
(http://static.howstuffworks.com/gif/hammer-1.jpg)
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Yeah, that'll work too but make sure the platters are smashed nice and good.
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Or just take the easy route:
(http://static.howstuffworks.com/gif/hammer-1.jpg)
A few friends and I did this with an old HDD of mine, we set it on fire and everything. It was fun. All my other old drives are laying around somewhere.