It's inevitable: sooner or later every computer user encounters the need to upgrade their hard drive. Maybe you're upgrading your laptop, or maybe your desktop just won't boot up anymore. Whatever the reason, you've got a perfectly good hard drive sitting in your desk drawer (or on your floor if you're like me). Don't let it go to waste! Recycle your hard drive today and put some cash back in your pocket!
1. The Challenge of Recycling Old Hard Drives
When you upgrade your computer, you might be tempted to recycle your old hard drive. But it's not that simple. There are a number of challenges that can arise when you recycle an old hard drive, especially the one found in the average home computer.
Oftentimes, new hard drives are advertised as being more expensive or have a more substantial capacity. However, if you only look at the price tag, it might be difficult to understand whether the advertised capacity could really withstand a higher temperature for an extended period of time over extended periods of time. Let's walk through two scenarios that offer slightly different pricing on a hard drive.
Example 1: "Cheap $80 Data Storage"
A tip of the hat to my friend, PC World, for writing about how cheap and small hard drives can be. Back when my older machine died (only 5 years ago), they couldn't buy a 3.5" 750gb external hard drive to make my life a little bit easier. Instead they offered me a 1TB external Seagate for $60. Wow! It's about the most affordable external hard drive money you'll ever spend.
I tend to use a combination of external HDDs (external HDDs charge faster than external SSDs) and solid state drives (SSDs) as backups. I happen to know that Samsung have a bunch of cheap solid state drives in the $100-$200 range. Now I can just plug in a hard drive, plug in a used NAS and browse around the cloud 24/7.
The one downside of using cheap SSDs is that they tend to produce noticeably slower data. This may well be relevant depending on where your data is, but it isn't the whole picture. Remember that we're not aiming to make this video - instead we aim to change your world once and for all! When I started all the things I do now, I used Windows 98 for at least seven years straight.
2. How to Dispose of Your Old Hard Drive
Once you make the decision to get rid of your old hard drive, you’ll need to find out how to properly dispose of it. Here are a few things you should know about hard drive disposal: 1) reuse, recycle, or donate your old hard drive.2) There's a chemical involved in most hard drive solid burning, so be sure to wash your hands thoroughly after handling or arrive early at the landfill instead of dropping the drive off at the office. 3) Recycling continues to be a popular method of recycling hard drive material, so it doesn’t hurt to give it a thought yourself. If you decide to keep your old hard drive, here are some other things you should never do with it: Throw it in the trash - If you keep drives in a drawer you don’t play with, chances are your hard drive will get overwritten over time and end up unrecoverable. Don’t put your hard drive in the trash! Find a home for your old drive in an appropriate recycling facility and get it recycled. Try to only recycle hard drive in the first place if it’s an inconvenient older hard drive. You never know when you'll need your old drive one day. Make a will - If you’re planning on keeping your old hard drive after disposing of it, you need to make sure you’ve got the paperwork—or have someone on your team who is. Probate laws dictate how your devices must be replaced if you die without a will. It’s never a good idea to keep your old hard drive in your possession without making a will to have it destroyed. Excavate - Been rehabbing the drive? If you’re unsure what to do with your hard drive, here’s your quick and easy way to salvage it: 1) Take your hard drive to a drive recycling company. 2) Take your hard drive to your local landfill. 3) Spend $.99 for a ton of Quick Resealable Drives.
3. How To Get The Most Money For Your Old Hard Drive
Hard drives can last thousands of years (our old 200g WD Easystore drive can today claim over 145,000; people are still finding old drives useful years later) without needing to be upgraded, but proper disposal can be a pain. If you don't really care about your hard disk, you can reb-format it to spare parts and drop it in your recycling bin, but if you want to use the hard drive for other things, it's probably best to let it go to a space where it can be properly recycled. Check out this guide for more information on what to do, and maybe even this resource for some other reusables.
Taking your hard drive to the recycling depersonalization isn't the only benefit to this practice – regular recycling can actually reduce the amount of toxic waste produced by landfills. According to a report by the United Nations Environment Program, landfills generate 3.5 million tons of trash every year.
Of course, trying to replace your hard drive is a random task, so one trick is to take advantage of many hard drive recycling programs. As an alternative to recycling your laptop hard drive, schedule a drive recycling appointment with your local recycling company. It may sound like a big hassle at first, but recycling the wrong kind of hard drive or losing parts every time you upgrade your drive is far more likely than you realizing.
Hard drive casters can be a major money-saver since they let you upgrade multiple hard drives at once. Many home libraries or office supply stores stock casters with the right size for your hard drives, and you can usually find them for around 10 cents each.
4. How To Prepare Your Old Hard Drive Before Selling It
Your old hard drive can be a goldmine of information, and you should take precautions before selling it to someone else. There are a few things you should do to make sure your data is safe and that you don’t end up causing problems for the person you sell it to.
Hard drives come in many different sizes, speeds, capacities, and why not genders! That means there are plenty of different options for you to choose from. You could go for external, solid state, RAID 1, or striped configurations. None of these particular configurations are bad, but it may depend on your needs, how much you have, and whether or not you are switching from a full blown desktop to a laptop. Take a hard drive shopping tour to find the one that best suits your needs.
Many computers come with an entire hard drive attached to the top and bottom of the computer case. The outside of your hard drive will be an ATA (or extATA) drive; the inside of the case could be formatted as part of storage or as an external hard drive. Options aside, an ATA drive may be full of extraneous and potentially harmful data. A solid state drive will have no moving parts, be much faster, and contain no moving parts at all. For the buyer, this means you only have to worry about the info on the inside of the hard drive, and the seller doesn’t have to look at hard drive garbage while it sits in the attic of his new house.
Older computers may not be able to boot up from a hard drive bootable with a CD, because the computer’s motherboard was made with a model number that was backwards. The only way to upgrade a hard drive this old would require performing a SCSI (or serial) swap to create a new bootable drive. Yes, it’s complex and a bit risky.
5. What Happens To A Used Hard Drive After You Sell It?
When you’re selling a used hard drive, you’re probably concerned with a few things: what will the buyer do with it? And what happens to a used hard drive in general? Well, there are a few things you should know about selling a used hard drive before you do.1. How Do I Find Out How Old My Hard Drive Is?
There are a few ways you can access your hard drive’s age, but just because your hard drive is 8 years old and you bought it at a garage sale doesn’t mean you have the exact tech specs for your hard drive. The capacity of hard drives ranges from 250 to 3 TB, depending on the manufacturer. The more capacity you have, the more likely your hard drive is in good shape (unless it's the 4 TB Samsung on the front loader—Renoise St. Claire Hard Drives, if you're curious). Unfortunately, the capacity on a hard drive isn’t always specific to your hard drive’s age; it affects everything from media, software and data on your computer. The less used a hard drive is, the less useful your computer’s hard drive becomes. By its numbers, the average person will use a hard drive over 50 times before they need to replace it.
2. How Much Does a Hard Drive Cost?
Unless you’re selling a rare 2 TB copy of G-Force, you’re probably not going to be bringing a bunch of cash to the table when you’re trying to sell your used hard drive. When you’re selling a used hard drive, you’re looking to get at least some money for your hard drive (or your parts, or both). A couple of hard drive vendors may charge extra for their hard drives, but more than likely, they charge because they have to recoup their costs. While it’s common credence that older hard drives cost more, there are worthwhile hard drives to buy at retail prices; at the very least, don’t spend absolutely zilch.