Acquiring Hard Drives

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.