What To Do With Old USB Keys, Low-Capacity Hard Drives? 546
MessedRocker writes "I have at least a few USB flash drives around that I haven't needed since I got my 16GB flash drive, a 40GB external hard drive which I haven't needed since I upgraded to 500GB, and a couple of SATA hard drives I have pulled out of laptops which are either as large or smaller than the one I have in my laptop now. Furthermore, I don't really know anyone who needs any hard drives or flash drives. What should I do with my small, obsolete storage devices?"
Starcraft on a stick. (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.yellowchrome.org/1com/galaxytribune/sos.html [yellowchrome.org]
Whats better than whipping it out and playing some starcraft?
Re:Chuck'em out (Score:5, Interesting)
Don't just chuck them. Look for a high-school that has a proper computer engineering program, and drop them off there. Whether you give them to the teachers or the students directly, they'll love you for it.
I remember building and disassembling many a computer in my class before I was able to install windows 95 (and subsequently, starcraft) on them.
I disagree - even 64MB is good for some things (Score:2, Interesting)
I use sub-GB sticks like floppies of yore when I don't have a LAN available. They are more convenient than a CD-R.
Re:ebay maybe? (Score:5, Interesting)
You could ebay them, if your time is worth nothing. To prep them, you'd have to mount them on a machine and securely wipe them (on a windows box download sdelete [microsoft.com] for free from sysinternals.) Use the -z option to wipe free space (critical for cleaning flash drives.)
Old drives are not as energy efficient as modern drives, so they cost more to spin -- a RAID would just be an expensive storage container. So unless you have a need for old, small drives (say an old, small machine) the safest advice would be to destroy them.
I like playing with neodymium magnets, so I take my drives apart and harvest them. Bending and flexing the platters will render them unreadable by almost anyone but the NSA, so unless you're protecting treasonable secrets, it's probably not worth the effort to do much more damage than that. (Be careful, glass platters don't flex - they shatter.) If you are that paranoid, heating them beyond their Curie point will absolutely destroy any stored information.
Re:A great idea. (Score:4, Interesting)
Valhalla awaits:
, Platter sure, heads swift
glorious memory
failed us not.
one word (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Chuck'em out (Score:5, Interesting)
Wait, high schools have computer engineering programs?! My high school seemed to be interested in finding the least qualified teacher possible for our computer-related classes, even though I found a professor from a prestigious university who was willing to teach the computer science classes. So not fair. :(
The Thumb Drive RAID Experiment (Score:2, Interesting)
Format them and donate to goodwill (Score:3, Interesting)
or salvation army or whoever in your city will take them (Austin TX has a very active Goodwill Computer Store).
Full format them first (not perfect, but there are so many drives with data on them that it is unlikely that someone will go to great lengths to read the edges of formatted tracks). If they don't format then break them down (cool magnets and platters that are better for target practice than CDs - they don't shred as easily).
Keep a few around, especially USB keys - better than burning something to CD is you need to hand data to someone.
Re:I don't know about anyone else (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:ebay maybe? (Score:2, Interesting)
Small USB sticks are good for asterisk (Score:1, Interesting)
...subject says it all really. Check out the astlinux distribution.
Machine Configuration Control (Score:4, Interesting)
I build all of my rack machines from the same ISO image (well, images. One for Linux, one for OS X).
Within this image, there is a script that runs at boot time that checks for the presence of a USB Drive. If there is a USB Drive, the script will place machine specific configuration files from the USB Key onto the machine in question, so that the machine no longer holds a vanilla install, but instead a completely unique version.
This is great for replacing a down machine on a network -- if 'node1.example.com' goes down, just grab a waiting, fresh machine from the stock pile, insert the usb key labeled 'node1', and start the machine, and watch as the machine takes on the persona of 'node1' without user interaction. Kind of similar to a kickstart script, but with the versatility of being able to change an already configured machine.
Its call Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks for (Score:1, Interesting)
Its call Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks for a reason. Seriously thats one of the reasons RAID was invented. I want to see what a few hundered 1 gig flash drives would do in a massive stripe :)
Data safety with extreme prejudice using a hammer (Score:3, Interesting)
Part and donate.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Hard drives have strong (and small) magnets in them which are fun to play with, useful on your fridge, useful in woodshops (hanging tools), and probably useful just about anywhere.
Little flash drives, even 8MB ones, can be useful for students and library users. Donate those puppies, please.
Spread Stuff (Score:3, Interesting)
Put something on the USB key which you deem important to know (hear, see, read etc.), then 'lose' it somewhere. Someone might find it and check what's on it.
OK, there's the internet. Hm.. But I'd guess that people value a found piece of hardware higher than some arbitrary web page.
Yeah... (Score:0, Interesting)
Use your oldest, least reliable, and soon-to-be-obsolete equipment to back up your critical data. Great plan.
Customize a gun holster/fannypack w/ the magnets? (Score:3, Interesting)
My daily carry piece (with CCW permit) lives in a fanny pack held closed with the magnets out of a couple of old 17gig Maxtor 3.5" drives. I ditched the zipper in favor of that setup, and it's a lot faster :).
Re:ebay maybe? (Score:3, Interesting)
In both cases (IDE/SATA and most modern SCSI drives which actually all do maintain an internal badblocks list (and a finite store of reserve blocks - i.e. high-capacity magnetic disks have been doing internal levelling for a while too), and wear-levelled flash drives), there is some risk of data recovery from blacklisted sectors that won't ever be wiped subsequent to their blacklisting. i.e. just because the drive can't/won't use the block anymore, even to write random data to it, doesn't mean the appropriate scanning microscope or whatever tools can't recover data from the "bad" blocks.
That almost certainly doesn't matter to anyone remotely normal, but if you're feeling maximally paranoid, thermite is your data-erasure friend...
Re:truecrypt wipe (Score:3, Interesting)
Then use TrueCrypt to create an encrypted partition
You mean if I fill a disk with 0's, I should TrueCrypt all the zeros.
Re:Good times (Score:3, Interesting)
Explosives + Old Hardware = Good Times!
Another good variation:
Firearms + Old Hardware = Good Times! [flickr.com]
I took the platter out of that and still have it sitting by my desk, really interesting how it deforms.
Re:Chuck'em out (Score:4, Interesting)
During my senior year (1997), my high school created an Intro to C Programming class. Since I had pretty much mastered TI-BASIC during various boring math and english classes, and had been lazily self-teaching myself C at home for a year or two, it seemed like a good idea.
They gave the calculus teacher a dozen 8086s (to be honest, you don't really need anything more than DOS at 8MHz to compile and run Hello World) and had him take night classes at the local Vo-Tech. He set up the curriculum so that he was teaching us about a week behind what he was learning in his own class.
I spent most of the semester helping my classmates learn what he was trying to teach, and yes, sometimes correcting his mistakes directly. I was so bored by the time the final project rolled around, I had to do SOMETHING to make it challenging. So, I wrote my final program for my TI-85, by setting up a cross compiler under a PC emulator on my Amiga, and loading the executable using ZShell. Easily the most fun I've had for a school programming project.
Convince Linux distros to move to drive images (Score:3, Interesting)
Work to convince the big distros of the world -- I'm looking at you Ubuntu -- to switch from using CD Rom Images as their prime mode of distribution to bootable flash/usb/ide disk images. Once you've tried it this way you will never go back, and you will now have a use for little drives.
Of course there are scripts that will turn the CD images into usb stick images, but they are time consuming taking away some of the time you save booting from a quicker medium. Instead of releasing a CD and a script to convert it, release a drive image and a script to turn that into an ISO, or release both.
(Plus, with writable media, it's easier to add a 2nd partition where the user can stuff drivers, localization scripts, answers to install questions etc.)
Then you could also donate all these media to linux distros who could fill them up with linux live disks and installs, and mail them out to people for postage.
Re:Store small, high-value secrets (Score:3, Interesting)
True, I forgot about that.
According to this, Perl's floats are stored in 64, 96, or sometimes 128 bits, depending on how it was compiled. My system reports using 64 bits, so it will run out of precision before hitting 2^53, it seems.
Also, even if Perl went all the way to infinity with "x++", the rate of new files being made would slow down considerably once you started hitting scientific notation.
So really, if you wanted to fill the disk in this way, you want to make sure you append to the file instead of overwriting, as I said in my other reply. Otherwise you may go into an infinite loop without filling up the disk.
Super strong fridge magnets (Score:5, Interesting)
I have taken apart many 2 to 10 gigers, those magnets are STRONG.
Stick them on the fridge ask someone to get one off and give it to you. Its fun trying to see them try.
http://www.computer-hardware-explained.com/images/hard-drive-magnet.jpg [computer-h...lained.com]
Re:And we still keep paper. . . (Score:3, Interesting)
I've heard a figure of something like 10 years for reliable storage of data on flash memory. Again, I don't have the **** link, and this may change as the technology advances anyway. But it doesn't sound like a fantastic long-term bet.
Somewhat grudgingly as someone who dislikes waste, I have to agree with you; a lot of this stuff isn't worth the hassle of keeping and trying to use unless you actually have some interest in and affection for it (e.g. wouldn't dream of throwing out my old 8-bit Atari computers). Giving it away to someone else to offset one's guilt when the hardware is *really* obsolete isn't necessarily doing them a favour either (unless you're quite clear what they're going to do with it).
Part of me wonders what would happen if some unspecified shit hit the fan in a few years time and we'd be grateful for all this "old" and "useless" computer stuff we're throwing out. And there's the similar "some people would be grateful for this".
But that really brings the discussion round to what "old" is. The 40GB drive described above is small by modern standards, but not uselessly so and certainly not obsolete.
OTOH, there are likely still so many genuinely *really* old computers (better part of a decade) out there in yellowing beige boxes that anyone who wanted one would probably be able to get them for free, simply for taking them as many of them as possible off the owners' hands.
Using them you'd realise that you could get a much newer secondhand computer that was miles better for very little. Or upgrading the old computer would be way more expensive than doing the same with a modern PC. (Example; my Dad has an old PC. The graphics card and a hard drive recently failed. AGP 4x cards are pretty rare nowadays- fortunately an 8x one worked, but even AGP in general is quite rare now. Meanwhile, it was surprising how small the selection of readily-available IDE drives was, and how much more expensive the larger models were than their SATA counterparts. He got them anyway, but he kind of understands why I said that past a certain point it makes more sense just to get a new computer).
Keeping old computer equipment is supposedly useful for testing and diagnostics (swapping parts to find out which one is faulty), but even old IDE drives can't be used to test a modern SATA interface!
The round file? (Score:3, Interesting)
Strip out the screws/magnets (always good for the hardware bin), and throw the rest away?
Make a Linux live disk (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Know any kids? (Score:3, Interesting)
I agree. I recently took an old Pentium 233MHz system and opened the case in front of my daughters (ages 6 and 8). I gave them screwdrivers and told them to take it apart. My older girl carried around the floppy drive (with cable) for about three months afterward, showing it to anyone who would listen. My younger girl helped install a NIC, too.