Cleared 500 old hard drives from the shop this year

I was doing inventory and the count hit 512. That's a full pallet of spinning rust we wiped and recycled. Ten years ago, I'd have maybe 50 drives a year, mostly 80 gig IDE drives. Now it's all solid state, and the old 3.5 inch drives just pile up. What's your shop doing with the old mechanical drives these days?

3 comments

3 Comments

markhall1mo ago

Ngl, that's a crazy amount of drives. Do you guys drill them before recycling? We had a client get real nervous about data, so we started doing that for peace of mind. It's a bit of extra work but it shuts down any questions. After that, we just scrap the metal and pull the magnets for the techs. The rest goes straight to the e-waste guys.

terrybennett1mo ago

Honestly, the noise is what gets me now. That full pallet must have sounded like a beehive when it was running. We started using some of the heavier old drives as doorstops in the back. Works better than the cheap ones from the hardware store.

ray1891mo ago

Our shop actually keeps a few of the old drives around for specific clients. Some of those older machines running custom software just won't boot from an SSD without a ton of work. The rest get pulled for magnets before recycling, which is a nice little perk.