Acquiring Hard Drives

Hello -

One obstacle I am facing is getting to people to give me their hard drives. I get it, there may be personal info on them. However, I have no desire to steal peoples info or spy on them - I don't have enough time in the day to get my own stuff done let alone someone else's! Anyway, I'd like to assure a client their info is safe. I have offered to give them back the platters or told them about dban.org, but that rarely works. I'd like to use fancy words like "R2 Compliant" or "ISO XXXXXX Certified" or something like that on my flyers and business cards but unsure of exactly what. Maybe I can sell just the platters to a company that destroys them in e recycling process?

Any other ideas?

Thanks,

Rob

If your not iso or r2 certified then why would you put that on a flyer? Mis-leading a customer is not condoned here.

This topic has been discussed in length before........Check archives and go from there........Oh yeah and good luck and welcome aboard

Offer to drill them right in front of them. Or take them apart. Portable drill and a few security bits will get you into just about any hard drive. Pull the controller board and then open it up. Pull the platters and either break them or otherwise in front of the customer.

The other option is to invest in a degausser (it's not cheap) that will basically destroy ANY data on a hard drive using an extremely powerful magnet.

The fancy letters you want to use...you have to go through a compliance process, take some classes and pay a bunch of money to get the certifications.

I just say, look at the amount of effort you want to put in vs the amount of drive you can get your hands on. Again, I look at resale only, since that is where the $$$ are ($10-100 per drive) vs a few bucks in scrap. IE I need to have access to a boatload of drives if I buy a $2K degausser....and if I am doing that, I would want some commercial accounts that I can CHARGE them to destroy the drive...most companies do that specialize in that sort of thing...granted many of those have a $5-8K hard drive shredder.

Good luck!

Chet, you might be able to split, drill, bend, or otherwise destroy the HD's and eliminate the worry of the customer.
Be sure to note the info of the HD on paperwork (serial # etc.) to C.Y.A.
Some people here have advertised that service and charged extra for it. Like a mobile service.

I'm not looking to mislead anyone. My thought was if I sell the platters to a company that is compliant, I would only need the client to trust that I am not deceitful and that their info would be properly disposed of.

I apologize I tried a search on this topic but wasn't really sure what I was doing.

I have thought of removing them on site but that is sort of a pain. Maybe that is the route I will have to go though.

The problem with R2/eStewards is that they are not cheap at all. I've heard the number of $20,000 thrown around on here. Sending them to a downline processor would let you say that "we send all hard drives to an R2 certified processor", which would be the way that I'd go. We have a lot of buyers on here that take hard drives- a couple are certified.

There isn't any cheap, throw away certification that I'm aware of for E-Waste.

If your buyer has an R2 raring you can put on your advertisement "R2 stream" However this won"t help much. The attention on info theft is so prominent it is like the Ebola of E tech. People don't understand e thieves don;t , for the most part, steal info from removed hard drives unless that drive is already a target. they steal the info from the hard drive while it is being used by the owner in the working machine.

Why not just remove the hard drive and hand the entire drive back to them. That would take two minutes and you'd still have all the other goodies. Then once they learn they can trust you, they'll probably call you back to take all those dang hard drives that are piling up :)

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Originally Posted by webuyselltradestuff

Offer to drill them right in front of them. Or take them apart. Portable drill and a few security bits will get you into just about any hard drive. Pull the controller board and then open it up. Pull the platters and either break them or otherwise in front of the customer.

The other option is to invest in a degausser (it's not cheap) that will basically destroy ANY data on a hard drive using an extremely powerful magnet.

The fancy letters you want to use...you have to go through a compliance process, take some classes and pay a bunch of money to get the certifications.

I just say, look at the amount of effort you want to put in vs the amount of drive you can get your hands on. Again, I look at resale only, since that is where the $$$ are ($10-100 per drive) vs a few bucks in scrap. IE I need to have access to a boatload of drives if I buy a $2K degausser....and if I am doing that, I would want some commercial accounts that I can CHARGE them to destroy the drive...most companies do that specialize in that sort of thing...granted many of those have a $5-8K hard drive shredder.

Good luck!

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Would a VHS eraser work? I've got one of those floating around the house.

Good thoughts - I'll check on some hard drive buyers or just pull them out on the spot. I suppose like any industry, you need to build trust and reputation.

Maybe I'm completely barking up the wrong tree but aren't hard driv logic bards some of the better boards you ca sell?


Im abut ready to scrap this dang keyboard

I have found that if you are professional, honest and operate your business with integrity then, overtime, people will trust you to wipe/destroy their information.

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.

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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.

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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.

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Originally Posted by olddude

People don't understand e thieves don;t , for the most part, steal info from removed hard drives unless that drive is already a target. they steal the info from the hard drive while it is being used by the owner in the working machine.

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Thank You!!!
It was very refreshing to hear someone else say it for once.

I get my hdd's from computer repair shops, they are either low storage capacity or have failed their tests. When I first started, my best customer would let me take everything except hdds, one day they finally called and said they were running out of room to store hdds, I offered to break them down at their shop. They cleared an area for me to work at, I showed them what I do to render them unusable and broke down 700+ drives at their shop, used their electric and enjoyed their a/c while I was working. After I was finished breaking them all down, they started letting me take them in smaller quantities, since I had gained their trust.

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Originally Posted by logansryche

Would a VHS eraser work? I've got one of those floating around the house.

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No...not even KINDA...a degausser is several 1000x the power of that at least...the wands come with their own case to shield it where you don't accidentally erase say your credit cards. They make them where you put the drive in can close the case as well..then the degaussing charge is applied.

Hard Drive degaussers are specialized equipment and would be far more powerful that anything you might find lying around.

Hard drive logic boards run about $10/lb (might be a bit less lately), then you have stainless steel and alluminum for the casing and the platters contain a VERY small amount of platinum. There is also a bit of gold on the end of the hard drive reader. IE they are not all that special as far as ewaste goes...UNLESS you are professionally wiping them and reselling....then they are basically free or a small amount of $$ and worth $20-100...and SSD/laptop drives sometimes more. You can actually make more money taking telecom equipment at $3-8/lb for the boards and you also can pull tantlum and other things off those.

Either way, unless you are specializing and LEARN how to wipe and resell...or offer that professional service along with a COD (certificate of destruction) (professional software will give this ability to you) where you CHARGE to do each drive, don't lose too much sleep over it. Yes it is $$$, but not all that much unless charging to wipe or reselling....take the time an LEARN in the forum here (search hard drive wiping for instance), take the other stuff and expand your business as you get more educated on the subject.

I have been doing things with computers since the early 90's. All of the procedures I mentioned above are not THAT hard, but it does take some technical expertise and/or a few $$ to learn to do....and ALOT of $$ if you are going the easy degausser method...but then the drive is TOTALLY unusable and not reparable.

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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.

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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.

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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. :)

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-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.

It's all good Red. I don't think you're running off topic. It's useful for the OP to get differing views of things and a look at the different opportunities that are out there.

Much as anything i'm just trying to help keep things grounded. You know how it is ....e-waste is being made out to be the big thing and a lot of new people are interested. It's really not all that different from any other kind of scrapping except that there are a ton of new things to learn. The harder you work at your studies ... the better you can do with it.

You broke into selling on e-bay and you're making better money. That's kinda like one or two levels up from straight scrapping.

If you're breaking down hard drives you have to go through a hundred to net 70 bucks. :-/

Just sayin' is all.

If you're in it for the aluminum and the logic boards then it's nickels,dimes,and quarters.

I have resold other items on ebay but wasn't planning on HDDs. I suppose if they were wiped and tested, no ones info would be compromised. I'd have to look into it some more. I've kind of been into computers for years - my first one was an 8088 with CGA graphics and a 30 Mb HDD. Things have definitely changed since then but I have always kind of stayed current with how things operate. I used to scrap copper when I was in the field as an electrician but now that I'm in the shop, I'm looking for an alternate. I've already got some good contacts in place so I will take the time to further those relationships and earn trust.

Thanks all for the input

Wonder if the big electromagnet at a scrap yard would do the job on a pile of hard drives. Or might that over do it?

We're glad to help where we can. :)

The technology is evolving so quickly these days that the rules change every three months. It's a job to keep up with it. That's really the case with data storage ( hard drives ).

Awhile back ....the trend was away from towers to laptops. The HDD's went from 3.5" which had some scrap value to 2.5" which don't have a lot of scrap value.

SATA data transfer speeds increased from 1gb/sec to 3gb/sec. Next they went from 3gb/sec to 6 gb/sec. Each new generation renders the last somewhat obsolete.

With the way things are going now .... they're trending away from laptops to smaller things like I pads & tablets. These smaller things have no hard drive at all.

There will still be some towers & laptops sold but the new ones will probably be using SSD's instead.

It's likely that the SSD's will be permanently soldered into the motherboard on most devices.

Point being: You gotta adapt to the changes. It's likely that we won't see that many hard drives in a few years so we will have to change the way we do e-waste. Re-sale on e-bay will be different as well as any data destruction services we might offer.

I like that Peter Gabrial song," i want to be sledge Hammer"

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Originally Posted by ChildhoodDream

Wonder if the big electromagnet at a scrap yard would do the job on a pile of hard drives. Or might that over do it?

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Probably with the outer shielding (the cover) I doubt it would even affect it.