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I wonder how many will die before they age out of usefulness. If you're still spinning 250Gb hard disks which are using the same power and space that a 4Tb dri
by brongondwana 13y ago
I wonder how many will die before they age out of usefulness. If you're still spinning 250Gb hard disks which are using the same power and space that a 4Tb drive could be using - it might not actually be economically sensible to keep running them.
Certainly the old 9.1Gb SCSI disks that were so popular 10 years ago are well past be justifiable to give power to now.
- outworlder 13y agoThat may be true for blackblaze. But these drives will still be useful. What about, say, shipping them to ONGs located in Africa?
- barrkel 13y agoI suspect the overheads of collection, shipping and distribution would dwarf the savings from not buying the optimal price/GB drive du jour. Hard drive space per dollar grows exponentially, and they're big weighty things. The window of time where it would be economical to reuse would be short, and value dubious.
- nodata 13y agoEven with the energy used for shipping them end-to-end?
- skriticos2 13y agoThat's a horrible idea! The logistics to collect and ship the old tech to Africa alone would probably cost more then just buying it bulk from China and ship in one batch. But there are other considerations: * This would also result in a big pile of waste in Africa, as their recycling infrastructure is limited. * They need food, shelter, stable politics and functional education before they can make any use of computers. * They have limited energy supply. Low powered tablets / laptops are much more useful.
- JoeAltmaier 13y agoAgreed. Better yet, keep them in a Google data center. Its far more efficient to make cloud storage available at a reasonable price. How about a diskless laptop that boots from cloud storage? That would be a sweet spot economically (depending on network costs I guess).
- ancarda 13y ago>How about a diskless laptop that boots from cloud storage? While this is a cool idea, how much bandwidth would you need to boot at roughly the same speed you do today? Some SSDs have 500 MB/s (~4 Gbit) read. You'd need to have gigabit networking with almost zero latency for that to perform well. I suppose a smaller OS like Chrome OS would be perfect for that. Even if this worked on fiber, how would you boot over a cellular network? Aside from costing you a ton of money, it would take forever to download.
- JoeAltmaier 13y agoTime is a fungible commodity. E.g. boot time may affect bottom line (rhyme!) in the EU; it can be different in Africa.
- rdc12 13y agoHow reliable are the networks in Africa? Outside of the cities?
- JoeAltmaier 13y agoI'm thinking, because they got network late, maybe better than my house in Iowa. I'm still on copper.
- alfor 13y agoYou could not believe the price they have to pay for computer. It is easily 3x, 4x the price we pay for the same hardware. And I they do need computer. But, it is possible that the logistic/shipping is more expensive than the production of new hardware. Also, cheaper more energy efficient hardware could be more cost effective. source: A friend of mine worked for ong in Burkina Faso
- DanBC 13y agoHere's a tv programme about the e-waste dump in Agbogbloshie, Accra, Ghana. It's probably on the Internet somewhere. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00sch78 http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00sch78)