scrap hard drive questions

Originally Posted by willy3486

I have a few questions on hard drives. I am not a big time scrapper, I do it as a hobby compared to others. I have lots of computer scrap as I have worked on computers for well over 30 years now. Anyway I have lots of old hard drive scrap. I enjoy taking apart old drives and have quite a bit of old hard drive parts. I have drive motors and also the head drives that reads the platters. I have a few 5 gallon buckets of the drive motors and other parts. I see a lot of aluminum I can salvage. But the local scrap yards just rate as copper,iron,aluminum,etc and would rate this as scrap. Would it be worth melting the aluminum somehow or just tossing it in the iron/steel scrap? If its worth melting down how is the best/cheapest way to do it?

No dont melt it, most places probably wont take it melted cause you could have melted other, less valuable metals into it without them knowing.....

If I had all that, and it was already all apart....

the alum would go to local yard as mixed aluminum ~$0.20/lb
motors would be elec motor/transformers at around ~$0.08/lb
everything else metal/plasticy/etc would all go into the shred pile with any other random scrap I had....

The most valuable part, is the boards from hard drives.... they are ~$10/lb to a buyer on here. no where local to me buys them.



If I had whole harddrives, not taken apart, I take the boards of, and leave the rest whole and both go to a buyer on here. ($10/lb for boards, $0.20/lb for the harddrives whole without boards)....

Thanks for the reply. Locally they don't have a lot of classifications, mainly scrap steel,aluminum,copper and wire. . I probably will just pull out what aluminum I can and toss the rest into my metal scrap trailer. I have a trailer I toss steel and iron into a trailer to give away to another scrapper as I don't have a good way to haul steel scrap. The copper/aluminum payout makes it feasible for me to take to the scrapyard.