Acquiring Hard Drives

Originally Posted by Scrappah

Rob:

I dunno ... it just seems like you would going through a lot of effort for very little gain.

Scrap value of a tower HDD might be 70 cents after expenses ? The laptop drives are hardly worth bothering with because you get so little scrap out of them.

It's true that the logic boards have value, but, it takes quite a few to make up a pound.

It's just my opinion .... the thing that makes it worthwhile is being able to properly wipe,test, and re-use a hard drive. (Maybe 10 - 15% of the ones that you run across will be suitable for re-use.)

It's not a big money thing. Just handy to have a bunch of prepped HDD's on hand if you're refurbishing computers. Much more convenient than having to order one off e-bay.

Completely depends on the hard drives. There is some really good money in resale of the right ones, or selling certain sizes to buyers on here who resell.

Originally Posted by ScrappinRed

Completely depends on the hard drives. There is some really good money in resale of the right ones, or selling certain sizes to buyers on here who resell.

I hear what you're saying .... been there / done that. The devil is in the details.

If you're doing mostly towers & laptops you might occasionally run into a HDD that you could sell to one of the buyers here for a few dollars.

The right thing to do is to wipe & test it before it leaves your shop though. First you have to set up a wiping & testing rig and then there's the time involved with actually wiping & testing the drive. Then it has to be carefully packaged and shipped. That eats up even more time and then you have to pay for the shipping.

Not all drives that have been shipped arrive intact so on some of them you only get scrap price. After you figure in time & costs it certainly isn't " good money " unless you're shipping lots of hard drives.

It's not likely that the average scrapper will run into a 100.00$ hard drive. That would be more like something that came out of a server. That's really a whole different realm.

I'm not really down on it ..... you know ? Just sayin' that it isn't as glamorous as people might make it out to be. Crunch the numbers, track your expenses, and keep track of the time you've got invested in it. That way you see it for what it is.

If you're doing e-waste scrapping it's mostly about making nickels,dimes, and quarters. On a good day you'll run across an item worth a couple of bucks.

Edited to add:

The hard drive market is changing. Has anyone noticed that new HDD prices have been dropping ? Now that they've worked past some of the limitations of the Solid State Drives there's not as much demand for HDD's anymore.

It's likely that the SSD's will render the current SATA drives obsolete .... just as the advent of SATA rendered the IDE drives obsolete awhile back.

The change isn't likely to be all that far off. You might not want to get too heavily invested in a hard drive technology that may fall by the wayside in a few years.

Originally Posted by Scrappah

If you're doing mostly towers & laptops you might occasionally run into a HDD that you could sell to one of the buyers here for a few dollars.

The right thing to do is to wipe & test it before it leaves your shop though. First you have to set up a wiping & testing rig and then there's the time involved with actually wiping & testing the drive. Then it has to be carefully packaged and shipped. That eats up even more time and then you have to pay for the shipping.

Not all drives that have been shipped arrive intact so on some of them you only get scrap price. After you figure in time & costs it certainly isn't " good money " unless you're shipping lots of hard drives.

I'm not really down on it ..... you know ? Just sayin' that it isn't as glamorous as people might make it out to be. Crunch the numbers, track your expenses, and keep track of the time you've got invested in it. That way you see it for what it is.

If you're doing e-waste scrapping it's mostly about making nickels,dimes, and quarters. On a good day you'll run across an item worth a couple of bucks.

-I've made thousands off resellable parts and I do this part-time.
-It's not hard to wipe and test hard drives and not expensive to get it set up. It IS time consuming. I track everything and regularly NET $5-15 per hard drive selling on Ebay and Craigslist. I also scrap a lot of hard drives that have no further value.
-It can be about much more than quarters, easily.

You are entitled to your opinion, just wanted to point out you are wrong about how much money can be made easily, honestly, and quickly off of computer parts. But that's okay with me, as it leaves more opportunity for those of use that do. Not getting rich off it, but I have done well with parts as have many others on this forum. But since this is off topic from the OP I'll move on. To each his or her own. Have a good weekend.