Piles O' Dead Drives

[Peahippo]

Does anyone have a productive idea for what to do with piles of dead IDE hard disk drives? I have about 40. They have things like powerful magnets inside, which could be extracted and sold. Is there any market for this kind of thing?

 

[oisnds]

The platters make good wind chimes, very nice sound.

 

[satrow]

Some of the drives, if the logic boards are ok, may be of use for data recovery purposes....

Andy.

 

[chriseubank]

I knew a guy who used to take out the platters, put on sticky numbers, and make clocks out of them. They looked quite nice, in fact!

...you could always melt them down and make fishing lures out of them?

play hockey with them, use the insides as a puck? (tape around the edges of course, don't want to take out a limb)

buy a GPS, find a geocache, and put it in the box for the next person to find?

Try to RMA them, see if you can get a new, bigger drive for free?

make a winch for your car out of multiple 12V motors from the drives?

find some way of having your CDRW drive read the platter? Perhaps in a custom-built CDRW drive tray?

hey! I'm trying!! Lol

 

[stormbind]

Presumably, not all 40 have the same fault. It may be possible to make a few good drives from broken ones.

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Memoria mihi benigna erit qui eam perscribam

 

[pcdocms]

You might want to see if you can sell them to a drive refurb company, as they might use the logic board from time to time . I might be interested depending what they are.

pcdoc

 

[VacuumTubeEra]

Sell them on Ebay as a single lot. Nonworking drives are offered quite often, and someone will buy them, for the right price (maybe a very few dollars + shipping). I suppose the buyer will do something useful with them - other than putting them in a landfill.

Another thought: Donating them to a technical school for possible use as a teaching tool - sort of like each student dissecting a frog in high school biology class.