4 ms·

Why big tech shreds millions of storage devices it could reuse

12 points by klelatti 4y ago

klelatti 4y ago
Interesting piece but it's not clear to me whether there would be sufficient market demand to re-use a large portion of old datacenter hard drives - who will be buying these?
ksaj 4y ago
This reminds me of old audio tapes. You can only use them so often, and let them age so many years before they start to sound awful. Film is a more obvious one. I would trust an ex server-room hard drive for continued use just as readily as I'd stick a bunch of thumb drives to handle storage expansion on the same systems. I simply wouldn't. And literally for the same reasons. Besides, look how cheap 3Tb drives are these days. Just opt for security and shred your old drives. I drill mine open and then burn the platters. Except the glass ones, 'cos they usually are already shattered by the time I get the case open. PS: Keep the magnets. They're really powerful. My fridge has a lot of them. They'll hold your calendar and kid's art way better than any usual magnet you'd buy for that. The DIY folks have even better uses for them.
- runnerup 4y ago
  If someone wants to give me 1PB of old hard drives that will lose sectors I’ll be happy to set up a super high redundancy system (100-200GB usable) for my homelab which constantly bans bad sectors.
praseodym 4y ago
Interestingly the server diagram highlights the two power supplies as being the hard drive, instead of the many hard drives in the front bays.
zcw100 4y ago
This only seems like an odd thing, not to use them, if you assume the cost of operating them is at or close to zero. It is not.
- benlivengood 4y ago
  Specifically, there is a financial reason the big companies have chosen to turn them off and destroy them at this point. It's pretty hard to have a more efficient way of using these drives when the company has decided that already-bought, already-shipped, already-installed drives in the most power efficient data centers in the world are not worth running any more.

12 points by klelatti 4y ago

Interesting piece but it's not clear to me whether there would be sufficient market demand to re-use a large portion of old datacenter hard drives - who will be buying these?

ksaj 4y ago

This reminds me of old audio tapes. You can only use them so often, and let them age so many years before they start to sound awful. Film is a more obvious one. I would trust an ex server-room hard drive for continued use just as readily as I'd stick a bunch of thumb drives to handle storage expansion on the same systems. I simply wouldn't. And literally for the same reasons. Besides, look how cheap 3Tb drives are these days. Just opt for security and shred your old drives. I drill mine open and then burn the platters. Except the glass ones, 'cos they usually are already shattered by the time I get the case open. PS: Keep the magnets. They're really powerful. My fridge has a lot of them. They'll hold your calendar and kid's art way better than any usual magnet you'd buy for that. The DIY folks have even better uses for them.

runnerup 4y ago
If someone wants to give me 1PB of old hard drives that will lose sectors I’ll be happy to set up a super high redundancy system (100-200GB usable) for my homelab which constantly bans bad sectors.

praseodym 4y ago

Interestingly the server diagram highlights the two power supplies as being the hard drive, instead of the many hard drives in the front bays.

zcw100 4y ago

This only seems like an odd thing, not to use them, if you assume the cost of operating them is at or close to zero. It is not.

benlivengood 4y ago
Specifically, there is a financial reason the big companies have chosen to turn them off and destroy them at this point. It's pretty hard to have a more efficient way of using these drives when the company has decided that already-bought, already-shipped, already-installed drives in the most power efficient data centers in the world are not worth running any more.