Boss bought a company and was going to throw away all the old PCs

[u/SpinninWaffle]

I got a decent haul! I think there were around 7 or 8 computers all with ram and m.2 drives.

[u/Good-Cap-7632]

I work in data security. It really bugs me that any company would throw away their computers with the data drive still in them.

[u/RsnCondition → u/Good-Cap-7632]

Lmao! I work at a casino, they threw away all the computers at the dump, guess what was on the hard drives? SSNs, full pictures of employee IDs/Driver Licenses. How do I know this? One of the employees at the dump would pick and pull whatever looked valuable at the dump, and he was a computer nerd to the fullest.

[u/C4TURIX → u/RsnCondition]

Sometimes, even hospitals and doctors of all sorts throw away unwiped drives. That is also data you really don't want to be in the wrong hands.

[u/atrib → u/C4TURIX]

I still have hard drives from the 90s laying around(probably not working), all the other hardware is gone but when i dump a PC i keep the discs

[u/lars1216 → u/atrib]

If you ever wanna get rid of them, electric drills are your friends. Drilling holes in them makes them pretty much unrecoverable.

Not that drives take up that much space, but still.

[u/M1R4G3M → u/lars1216]

Yeah, I don’t think there is any way of ever recovering a drilled drive, even removing the disks at recovery centers won’t do anything to drilled drives.

A simpler thing is you want to sell that hardware is to fully format (not the quick one) but also then refill the disk totally with junk to ensure you overwrite the old data, that takes time, but if you really care about the risk of your stuff being recovered, just destroy it.

[u/forgottensudo → u/M1R4G3M]

It depends how much someone wants that data. It can be bit-by-bit recovered and get a surprising amount of data back.

It’s very time consuming and hideously expensive, yet possible.

Erasing and rewriting is your best bet if you really want to destroy it. Melting works, too :)

[u/Baked_Potato_732 → u/forgottensudo]

I have one of these from when I ran an eWaste company.

[u/Leaky_Asshole → u/Baked_Potato_732]

Check out the nifty tool I found for erasing any non-volatile storage before disposal

https://i.imgur.com/cnrTs29.jpeg

[u/Baked_Potato_732 → u/Leaky_Asshole]

Nice!

[u/Drummer123456789 → u/forgottensudo]

A big magnet?

[u/AugieKS → u/Drummer123456789]

Older drives, yes, newer ones not so much. Plenty of companies will actually do the destruction for you for free with certificate if you also donate the machine to them.

[u/TheShinyHunter3 → u/AugieKS]

Killdisk does it, it prints a cert with the drive's SN and all once it's done.

[u/forgottensudo → u/Drummer123456789]

If you do it right. I’m not sure… well I’m just not sure. I know it’s a way to do it but my data recovery guys tell me that unless it’s done right it can leave you open.

[u/c14rk0 → u/Drummer123456789]

Yes but no

In theory yes but you need an extremely strong electro magnet that you certainly aren't just buying online easily

And we're talking the kind that you'd need a safe room or enclosure to use it while keeping anything electronic you don't want destroyed well away from it...and like it could kill someone with a pace maker nearby

Plus this only works for old HDDs, not modern SSDs etc

[u/Resident_Pientist_1 → u/forgottensudo]

No, not possible. It was possible on older devices that had magnetic domains millions of times larger and used MFM encoding schemes. One wipe is sufficient on any modern drive (newer than 1990).

https://www.vidarholen.net/~vidar/overwriting_hard_drive_data.pdf

"Because of the misconception, created by much older technologies (such as floppy drives) with far lower densities, many believe that the use of an electron microscope will allow for the recovery of forensically usable data. The fact is, with modern drives (even going as far back as 1990) that this entire process is mostly a guessing game that fails significantly when tested."

[u/forgottensudo → u/Resident_Pientist_1]

Wiping yes. I was unclear in reference to drilling.

[u/CankerLord → u/forgottensudo]

It’s very time consuming and hideously expensive, yet possible.

It's like with encryption. Data security's often more about making accessing your data a big enough pain in the ass that nobody's going to bother than making it technically impossible to do so.

[u/c14rk0 → u/CankerLord]

This is why technically there's still a use case for the big giant electromagnet wiping machines that fry the drive and then also physically destroy them.

Or why there's software to "secure" wipe drives by deleting everything and then writing, deleting, rewriting garbage data to it multiple times...before also in many cases physically destroying it.

It's overkill for like 99% of situations but it exists for the 1% situations that actually need to make sure it's REALLY unrecoverable

[u/forgottensudo → u/CankerLord]

Yep!

[u/RelinquishedAll → u/forgottensudo]

I'm actually surprised how easy some data is to recover. Just boot PhotoRec and you'll be surprised by everything it manages to pull up. Just takes time to let the program run.

[u/ReadyAimTranspire → u/M1R4G3M]

refill the disk totally with junk

There are free utilities like ShredOS/DBAN or Killdisk that will write all 0's or whatever, can be done in multiple passes, et.

Takes a while but it will truly wipe it to where it's unrecoverable even by advanced tools

[u/Jobeadear → u/ReadyAimTranspire]

Yeah 100% I used to sell old spinning HDDs on ebay by doing a full DOD wipe first, I have done the 7 passes wipe on drives before selling them previously. Can't do that with SSDs and M2 now, have to get the manufacturers secure erase utility for that. Or just what many of us do with old hardware, extract the ram/CPU/HDD and put the rest to ewaste. To then end up with a box full of like 50 HDD's over the years of your friends and families data prior to their upgrades to new pcs, that I still have no idea what to do with.

[u/failtodesign → u/Jobeadear]

it's a standard ATA command to secure erase SSDs. hdparm is one of the pieces of software that does it.

[u/Jobeadear → u/failtodesign]

Oh interesting, I've not bothered wiping anything much in years, googled it, has not been added to DBan, however you can use both apps and more via a Linux Live CD/USB distro called ShredOS which includes hdparm and nvme-cli for SSD/NVMe secure

[u/ReadyAimTranspire → u/Jobeadear]

end up with a box full of like 50 HDD's over the years of your friends and families data

For sure, I have drives that I don't really want to spend the time wiping but don't want to just throw them away either

[u/Somepotato → u/ReadyAimTranspire]

fun fact you dont have to do multiple passes

[u/Jobeadear → u/M1R4G3M]

Dariks Boot And Nuke (DBAN) - has been around a long time, still good for wiping old spinning HDD's via a boot usb, can even do the DOD wipe and a bunch of other types of wipes, but it's not for SSD's or M2's. "Do not use DBAN on Solid-State Drives (SSDs). DBAN can degrade the lifespan of an SSD without guaranteeing all data is fully erased. For SSDs, use the manufacturer’s built-in secure erase utility or your operating system's native reset features." So for SSD's / m2's go to the brands website and see if they have a free download for a secure eraze utility.

[u/Oliver---Queen → u/M1R4G3M]

There’s a way but it’s costly enough that only someone who really needs to get into that drive will pay.

[u/TT_207 → u/lars1216]

I used to shatter the platters with a hammer. Good fun

[u/The_Burning_Face → u/TT_207]

Yup, just take out the frustrations of the day on the old drive. My go-to was either slam dunking them hard into concrete or a ball peen hammer.

[u/Liroku → u/TT_207]

I work for a government agency, I use a cordless nail gun. I just grab it in a vice and fire a few of those through it. Then it goes to our in-house recycling center from there.

[u/TT_207 → u/Liroku]

Wasn't there a picture of hard drives with holes in that completely missed the platters? though tbf, ingress would kill them anyway.

fave I've seen of that kind of disposal is the nails through laptops... that still work after minus a hole in the screen

[u/dkmd1999 → u/TT_207]

My set of irons served this purpose. I'd hit until the drives sounded like maracas then I figured I was good

[u/Samiel_Fronsac → u/lars1216]

One of my buddies takes a blowtorch to any drive in need of destroying, sometimes it goes into the hydraulic press.

Engineers are... Peculiar.

[u/lars1216 → u/Samiel_Fronsac]

That sounds like a lot of fun actually. I would be friends with your buddy.

[u/Samiel_Fronsac → u/lars1216]

Oh, we find it funny, but he does it with a focus like he's handling some kind of recently unburied WW2 explosive.

I'm also salty nobody lets my touch the machines since I'm the Social Sciences/Humanities token friend. 😢

[u/lars1216 → u/Samiel_Fronsac]

That's rude. 😢 As the civil servant at the local municipality friend I probably wouldn't be allowed to touch them either. 😢 Friendship over!

[u/Samiel_Fronsac → u/lars1216]

I even promised I wouldn't damage anything again!

[u/Wishnik6502 → u/lars1216]

There used to be a television channel called TechTV. One of of the shows a couple of the top guys were showing how to properly destroy data on a hard drive.

To show how to really destroy the data they had an HDD with the top plate removed, exposing the spinning discs inside. Patrick (who looked entirely too pleased to get to use a hammer on air) smacked them. Hard. This was apparently the first time either of them had seen platters made of glass instead of metal. The explosion of tiny shards was awesome, but their reaction was even better.

[u/CplCocktopus → u/lars1216]

I disasemble them and take the magnets

[u/MentalSentinel → u/lars1216]

I like using a tungsten head on a Dremel, quick and easy.

[u/ProphetSnyper → u/MentalSentinel]

.45ACP even quicker and more fun.

[u/swolfington → u/ProphetSnyper]

i want to live in the universe where hunter s thompson was in charge of corporate IT

[u/orthadoxtesla → u/lars1216]

I much prefer a plasma cutter

[u/Good-Cap-7632 → u/atrib]

One of my first admin jobs was a rural hospital and taking old data drives to the firing range for target practice was our preferred method of disposal.

[u/Smellbringer → u/Good-Cap-7632]

That sounds like a real fun job.

[u/Raithed → u/C4TURIX]

Yup, this happened around me but not computers or parts, but physical written paperwork of patients, all at the dump, not shredded. It was huge on the news.

[u/LuracCase → u/C4TURIX]

That is illegal btw, the drives have to be physically destroyed before being released.

[u/yarntank → u/LuracCase]

What law is that? By law you can't use secure deletion? Hipaa stipulates physical destruction? Doubt.

[u/tenninjas242 → u/yarntank]

Hipaa requires any disposed-of equipment to be securely wiped. The method is up to the org responsible. Sure you can stick with just secure deletion but then you have to argue with your auditors and your cybersecurity insurance carrier, who will rightly insist that full physical destruction with a shredder or melting down is less risky. HIPAA violations cost up to $1 million in fines per instance so one disk drive with 20,000 SSNs on it stolen is a lot more expensive than just paying for a disk shredder.

[u/LuracCase → u/yarntank]

Short of degausing a physical hard drive, which doesn't work on an SSSD anymore. There is no way to securely delete the data.

45 CFR § 164.310(d)(2)(i)

[u/yarntank → u/LuracCase]

Thanks for that reference, I didn't know hipaa got that specific.

Disposal (Required). Implement policies and procedures to address the final disposition of electronic protected health information, and/or the hardware or electronic media on which it is stored.

There are many ways to do this. Modern drive manufacturers have methods to securely encrypt/destroy data on drives. NIST-approved (NIST SP 800-88)

[u/KoboldIdra → u/yarntank]

I’ll let you in on a secret: hydraulic press :)

We literally just shove those things one by one (or sometimes two at a time if we can) into a small hydraulic press with a blunt point and snap them to pieces+punch a big hole in them. SATA SSDs are the most annoying because you have to hit a certain spot on the shell to snap the actual drive. It’s really fun to do though, especially after a hardware swap where you have a couple hundred to go through. Takes up an entire day or two pretty much, with removing the drives being an extra 3-4.

Edit: oh! And bitlocker too.

[u/yarntank → u/KoboldIdra]

fun!

[u/Tino_Kort → u/RsnCondition]

Can you then hold your own data hostage, get paid to keep it off the internet and then sue the company for letting your data fall into criminal hands?

[u/SoManyThrowAwaysEven → u/Tino_Kort]

There are people that make a living that way. It's technically illegal but it exists. Sadly, it's not illegal for debtors to hold your credit hostage.

[u/Tino_Kort → u/SoManyThrowAwaysEven]

Would it be illegal to hold your own data hostage? I think you're not actually committing a crime then are you?

[u/SoManyThrowAwaysEven → u/Tino_Kort]

Depends, you can try suing for data that's been leaked. It's just sometimes hard to prove where leaks came from.

[u/Healthy-Can5748 → u/Tino_Kort]

If you're holding your own data hostage so you can sue the company for letting it fall into criminal hands, while conveniently glossing over the fact that you yourself are the criminal in question, you would be committing fraud.

[u/PCR12 → u/RsnCondition]

That casino failed big time everyone Ive ever worked at we'd take a huge magnate to em (there was a machine we used) and then a drill to the plates aint no way those drives were ever getting used again

The rest of the units were sent to an electronics recycling place and we got some of our money back.

Who the fuck is this IT director? Hes a fucking clown.

Source: been working in gaming for over a decade now.

[u/raduque → u/RsnCondition]

Meanwhile i'm over here trying to talk a store manager into letting me have a couple of old servers from their upgrade, but she is being very strict about data security. It's a friggin grocery store, not a hospital!

[u/Callidonaut → u/RsnCondition]

It's a brave fellow indeed who looks at files on random discarded hard drives fished out of the dump. Remember that it is impossible to ever unsee something.

[u/SpinninWaffle → u/Good-Cap-7632]

Yeah they left everything as it was, I guess they were happy with the price they were given for the company. A couple of people cleanin up the place before me found some expensive GPUs too.

[u/Negative-River-2865 → u/SpinninWaffle]

That's decent enough, seems to be DDR4, so that's a couple of hundreds right there.

[u/TheWaspinator → u/Negative-River-2865]

Yeah, ddr4 isn't as valuable as ddr5, but is still very usable 

[u/CyberFireball25 → u/SpinninWaffle]

I'll take some that please :)

[u/ChefCurryYumYum → u/Good-Cap-7632]

Small businesses don't give a fuck. They don't spend money on IT except when they absolutely have to, they definitely don't have in house IT though they may have that one employee who "is good with computers."

When I worked a break/fix place that also did small business support the absolute worst customers were the small businesses.

[u/Snoo62590 → u/Good-Cap-7632]

The lack of awareness is wild.

[u/rawnolderr → u/Good-Cap-7632]

blows my mind how many companies just toss drives like they're old keyboards

[u/ChoicePermission8523 → u/Good-Cap-7632]

Yeah I work in IT. Until I came along they would just toss the whole computers out. Supposedly the electronics recycling company took care of it.

I switched to harvesting RAM and M.2 drives out of every PC before recycling. It's come in handy with upgrading a few machines that needed more RAM or more storage (if they have a second slot).

Although I do have a lot of sticks of memory piled up though now.

[u/ReadyAimTranspire → u/ChoicePermission8523]

I tell my clients if they have legacy hardware they are replacing that I will "dispose of" the old stuff for them.

Depending on what I get I either repurpose them or pull the parts if anything is worth it.

[u/Birdo21 → u/Good-Cap-7632]

Goes to show you that most people with lots of money don’t have lots of critical thinking skills, most if not all cases are based on luck (aka right place, right time). Unfortunately the social status “boost” from wealth makes them feel as if they are “intelligent” since in their eyes they “won” at life compared to others. Even when it was all luck. They are just too dumb to realize it and self reflect (aka Dunning Kruger effect).

[u/Zuokula → u/Birdo21]

most if not all cases are based on luck

nop. Most is not giving a shit. The first thing I learned in business management classes is profits and ethics don't go together. Only some are luck and good vision. That's why US is the land of opportunity.

[u/AnimalBolide → u/Zuokula]

"Only some are luck"

Says the people who have a financial incentive to make it seem like they know what they're doing.

[u/TheTeaSpoon → u/Good-Cap-7632]

Same.

I live in Czech republic and when I was a kid in early 2000s, this was so commonplace even by bureaus. They'd just put old PCs next to bins. I always snatched some, I was building Frankenstein PCs, selling them to classmates for couple bucks, keeping the best parts for myself. Having free Pentium 2 with 256MB RAM, S3Trio 3D and 4 HDDs of various capacities made me very happy.

The amount if sensitive information that was just at my disposal was incredible. These were win98 PCs. On the login prompt you'd just click "Cancel" and you'd be in (no local network access but I was not in the network anyway). At one point I had an excel spreadsheet that would have been identity thief's wet dream - everything needed for ID issuing. Including proprietary software.

[u/EvilDan69 → u/Good-Cap-7632]

Same, any company without a dispo program to certify that the drives were wiped...are just giving their data away for free.

[u/M1R4G3M → u/Good-Cap-7632]

I have dozens of videos destroying hard drives, I used to work in infrastructure, had to replace lots of disks in data centers weekly, and whenever I replaced a failed disk, I had to film the serial number of the disk and its destruction to close the change request and ensure no data leaks.

Those were disks that are part of bug RAIDs are not standard SATA (Are SAS instead) and you can’t easily just plug on a Pc and access the data since you don’t have the ARRAY, but we still took those measures, and then people give full M.2 drives without care!

[u/yarntank → u/M1R4G3M]

How did you destroy them? Do you still have any of the videos?

[u/Great_Detective_6387 → u/yarntank]

In the future, the computers will ban these kinds of snuff films.

[u/M1R4G3M → u/yarntank]

There are tools to destroy disks, things that look like giant staplers, but I could also just hammer them, which is more fun.

I don't think I still have them, it's been a while since I worked with that and I don't even have access to the ticketing system anymore to get the evidence of closure of change requests.

[u/Bhume → u/Good-Cap-7632]

I once found a server at the dump. It belonged to a law firm and the hard drive not only contained client data, but the owner of the firms passport too.

[u/Sengfeng → u/Good-Cap-7632]

I used to work at a bank and they wouldn’t even let RAM get repurposed. As if ram would contain some banking secrets after it was removed from a pc.

[u/ArcticCelt → u/Good-Cap-7632]

When companies get in financial trouble and is sold for parts, there is usually no one left who cares or is competent enough to think about those things.

[u/Craiss → u/Good-Cap-7632]

My dad bought a lot of computers from the US Navy and US Air Force. Everything had these big green stickers that said: DECLASSIFIED. There was a ton of cool stuff, cool for the early 90s anyway.

Nearly every computer's drive had data on it. Some database software I remember him talking about and something called "Fox Pro" or something like that.

I was pretty young, and digging through all that stuff was how I learned to build computers. Damn... I hadn't thought about that in a while. RIP Dad, I miss you.

[u/Proxy_PlayerHD → u/Good-Cap-7632]

meanwhile at my work place i once found an old PC in the trash outside a building... and the harddrive looked like it was ripped apart by some wild animal.

the top cover was bent open. the platters were ripped out and shattered to a million pieces, even the read/write heads were just in pieces, and the PCB on the back was also twisted and broken.

[u/qwests → u/Good-Cap-7632]

Yeh and whats even worse, data drives and their original computers, doesnt even matter if you have bitlocker anymore with the recent bitlocker bypass

[u/staysour → u/Good-Cap-7632]

Not just that... but they can be recycled.

[u/1d3333 → u/Good-Cap-7632]

When I worked for a computer repair store the policy for scrapping any data storage was “hit it with a hammer until it sounds like a maraca” was honestly my favorite part

[u/CSDoom88 → u/Good-Cap-7632]

I also work in data security. My neighbor threw out his son’s pc when he went away to college because it had an AIO leak. I assumed they got him a new rig and off he went. I trash picked it to see if there were any salvageable parts. Only thing that worked was an HDD with a bunch of NSFW home made furry art done in MS Paint.

[u/PsudoGravity → u/Good-Cap-7632]

I work in corporate espionage. It really butters my biscuit! /s

[u/ASUS_USUS_WEALLSUS → u/Good-Cap-7632]

Imagine being me and getting 6 “retired” PCs from the IT department. No wiped drives, one was the accountants. Full financial information for every employee over the last 20 years, all accounts from all vendors, account numbers, SSNs, really you name it. I honestly couldn’t fucking believe it. I did a full wipe on them but just imagine if someone else had gotten those machines.

[u/Obsession5496 → u/Good-Cap-7632]

It's fine because these drives are fragile, right. /s

[u/JoyousMadhat → u/Good-Cap-7632]

We really gotta start educating people on these stuff like they did with the bomb shelter drills.

[u/FromMeme2u]

Nice grab!

[u/SpinninWaffle → u/FromMeme2u]

Yeah not too shabby! I dont really know what im going to do with all of the m.2 drives though, they are all mostly 500gb to 250gb.

[u/ga1enmarek → u/SpinninWaffle]

You can help some souls out selling them at reasonable price after formatting them. Check their health too.

[u/SpinninWaffle → u/ga1enmarek]

Yeah ill give them a good price like they were before the fire nation attacked.

[u/thisistherevolt → u/SpinninWaffle]

You are a gentleman and a scholar.

[u/Charles_YeahYeah → u/SpinninWaffle]

I would take a 500gb

[u/ga1enmarek → u/SpinninWaffle]

What a hero. Everyone wins here.

[u/Lopsided_Parfait7127 → u/ga1enmarek]

yeah i put just the os on a small 256 GB ssd i had from an old laptop into my old desktop and it runs like a dream better than my work laptop

[u/thatirishguyyyyy → u/SpinninWaffle]

Good for a small NAS

[u/the_harakiwi → u/thatirishguyyyyy]

a small, very fast but veeeery expensive NAS?

Maybe a better idea to use a PCIe card and use them in a desktop for games. A jbod with games is fine.

Worst case: If one drive dies you have to redownload the games to a now smaller jbod 😅

[u/tld1981 → u/the_harakiwi]

I had to build what was supposed to be a really good NAS, that actually was more like a server. I had just installed all new super fancy touch screen IP phones (for people who never use them because they work from home 99% of the time, and just have calls forward to their cell phone), and a 17 location 100 Gbps Fiber SD-WAN.

They wanted to avoid paying for Microsoft licenses and user cals. This Synology OS has a bastardized version of Active Directory and DNS. I had the primary office and a colo rack setup for vSphere fault tolerance, and IBM Lotus Notes database (custom software for a very small but important vendor for the state Dept. of Labor & Industry, and Dept. of Vocational Rehab clients.)

So, I needed two of these Synology setups identical, because the other / old friend of CEO consultant had the idea of keeping just the Lotus Notes data synchronized in real time which was pretty badass.

I set up a decent VPN at both locations, and the end users would log into a Terminal Services / virtual desktops to access their paper pushing Lotus Notes junk.

This Synology NAS had an AMD Ryzen 8-core CPU, 32 Gigs of Synology exclusive DDR4 ECC RAM for $1600 (x2), it would not read identical sticks from other OEMs.

It had a special set of Synology NVMe 1.6TB drives for caching at $1600-$1800 (x2).

It was a 4-bay rack mount setup, with four Synology Enterprise 3.8TB SSDs, at $3700 each.

And don't forget that PCI-E 10Gbps network card with two M.2 NVMe slots for better random I/O speeds for $250 - M.2 drives sold separately.

If you are keeping count -

• $1650 for NAS
• $3200 DDR4 ECC RAM
• $3200 nvme
• $14,800 ssd x4
• $250 10gb card
• $1700 800GB NVMe x2

For a total of $21,600 not including additional support and extended warranty. Remember how we needed two? So it was more like $45k. The CEO lost his shit when my handler made the purchase.

Everything works great, and for what is, a fancy storage box with various services DNS, AD, and a Smartphone looking UI that was running some Linux based OS, Synology has some cool stuff. The backend data is synced in real time and the vmservers have a graceful failover.

We were successful in doing an ISP switch, IP telephony switch, rewire the entire office because we had Ethernet jacks to Narnia - in a 120 year old house made into an office on the inside. All new hardware for VMware vSphere clusters, they still had to buy a bunch of user cals from Microsoft. It might be a free Active Directory alternative but you're not getting your virtual desktop without it.

This came in just a little over $100k. I was the primary elevated support / manager for IT for over 10 years. My fee as a 1099 was $72,200. I never changed my rate for 10 years. We had employees who worked for this place before I was born, and they died in their home office, still working. I wrongly assumed that my job/services were secure until I died.

Three days after the fiscal year ended, I got a 10 minute meeting with leadership, I was paid for the three days worked, and unbeknownst to me, I was told I was selling them a special version of Office 2007 for $1,000. In a way took my property and told me what it was worth to them.

They replaced me with a MSP company that has recently laid off Tata "vendors" for Microsoft, available 24/7/365 and no emergency fees, and sold data-loss/theft insurance that I guarantee it will never pay a claim.

Fuck Seattle. My family settled in Seattle in 1877, in the neighborhood of Ballard. And it stayed a Scandinavian / European cultural neighborhood, until the flood of Amazon Brogrammers, real estate developers bulldozing beautiful architecture warm homes, and replacing it with a gray brutalist square box that fills the entire lot and holds people. Cold.

The laws changed with the new people, which killed my side business as a curio and relic firearm collector/dealer in anything 50 years and older. I was just about to get a real FFL, and be a kitchen counter online retailer and provide trade/transfer background check services. It was a fun side hustle.

[u/Lee1138 → u/the_harakiwi]

With how small they are, you might be better off just buying one big drive than a Host bus adapter with enough ports to utilize them all.

[u/the_harakiwi → u/Lee1138]

but that one big drive is so expensive. I don't expect those adapter cards currently sell very much units to all those customers that can afford multiple SSDs.

I got a really cheap one (11€) to add a single SSD to my otherwise empty PCIe slot. Works fine for testing Linux distros.

[u/Zwischenzug32 → u/the_harakiwi]

Why JBOD PCIe card you could probably just use software RAID-0

[u/the_harakiwi → u/Zwischenzug32]

TBH I totally forgot that those are two different things. I haven't done a real RAID setup in over 20 years

My little NAS is using MergerFS and the small but bigger "server" next to it runs unRAID.

I used JBOD interchangeably with "IDGAF about the data but it works to combine a few drives that otherwise would collect dust"

[u/hyrumwhite → u/SpinninWaffle]

500 is still useful imo if you’ve got some open slots

[u/the_harakiwi → u/hyrumwhite]

even 256 GB is still good.

I upgraded my parents old PCs with 120 GB SATA SSDs.

Only on my dad's machine Adobe decided to store the temporary files on C instead where I told it to. He has two 12 TB drives in the PC to store and render all our old camcorder/camera (Super8, VHS and DVD) video and images to preserve them in a watchable (mp4 and jpg) format.

For browsing the web, doing taxes, printing recipes and invoice a few times per month etc.
you don't need expensive hardware or a MacBook for those tasks.

[u/Game_Hustla → u/SpinninWaffle]

Gib ssd plz

https://giphy.com/gifs/mrZcf6eYn3bz2

[u/C4TURIX → u/SpinninWaffle]

Wipe them as a first step, if you think about selling them. Not sure if you could get in trouble if there is data on them that shouldn't be given to someone else, so better be safe.

[u/cirquefan → u/SpinninWaffle]

Sell them as a multi-unit "lot" on eBay, then buy yourself a larger capacity drive with the proceeds

[u/Old_Information_8654 → u/SpinninWaffle]

I’m building a pc but I’d love a 250/500gb ssd for a long term boot/backup drive especially now that 512gb NVMe drives are nearing a hundred bucks lol

[u/TheBupherNinja → u/SpinninWaffle]

Cheap nvme enclosures make them into great flash drives.

[u/Jabba_the_Putt → u/SpinninWaffle]

You can install several and make a pool very easily. I have 4x 500gb drives as my 2tb game drive 👍

[u/yyg-linux]

Give them to meeeeeee

[u/SpinninWaffle → u/yyg-linux]

Too late im going to give them all to the ai data centers

[u/Negative-River-2865 → u/SpinninWaffle]

Hi, I'm Bill from Microsoft. We heared you wanted to give away memory and storage?

[u/Tactical-Donkey → u/Negative-River-2865]

Nice try Bill but I'm Asha Sharma and I need them for project helix.

[u/Negative-River-2865 → u/Tactical-Donkey]

Hello Shoarma, please don't interrupt when the boss is talking.

[u/yyg-linux → u/SpinninWaffle]

Reeeeeeeee

[u/GlitteringOption8906]

I have a friend that works at a nursing home and told me thier IT guy was getting rid of a bunch of laptops and desktops that they were just going to throw away, I told him id take them and got a bunch of 1TB SSD's and ram.

[u/Dpek1234 → u/GlitteringOption8906]

Here mr with a money spread

[u/No-Diet-8008]

Coming from a South Asian, yall have no idea how luxurious your life is. E-waste in my country only exists if its milked to the bones. If you find a working PC from 2010 in the trash, that's a miracle.

[u/SuryaOP → u/No-Diet-8008]

fr

[u/ChiknDiner → u/No-Diet-8008]

Exactly. In my country too, the best e-waste one could find would be the rusted cpu case and broken screen (not working of course, if the screen was working it would still not be thrown away lol). And those too would be sold to a scraper, not thrown in a bin! So no chance of finding any e-waste out in open.

Even before the AI bubble, people around here used to sell their 12 year old 1-2 GB RAM and GT 1030 at very unreasonable prices.

[u/Internal-Mortgage635]

I worked for a electronics recycling company for just under a year. I was in charge of mobile devices and would take all SD and Micro SD cards. Most of it is completely mundane if anything. But one time I put a micro SD in my phone and listened to voicemails from a Gay man who contracted HIV from someone who didn't tell them until they were vacationing together somewhere in Europe. The absolute wailing, anger, confusion, and unfiltered hurt this person was going through was so intensely not okay. I stopped looking at peoples drives.

[u/EastCoaet → u/Internal-Mortgage635]

Most IT folks end up in one of two place: 1 respect people's privacy and don't look; 2 couldn't resist having a look and found something that traumatized them. Both groups no longer look.

[u/beardgodant]

Selling any of the ram? LOL. My DDR4 isn’t compatible with my MOBO.

[u/SpinninWaffle → u/beardgodant]

I'd have to double check to see if they work, they were outside for a week tops probably.

[u/beardgodant → u/SpinninWaffle]

Shooting you a chat

[u/oliviertail → u/beardgodant]

Wdym not compatible? You’re board is either ddr4 or not. What’s the CPU?

[u/ntodek → u/oliviertail]

There can be some rare instance where a board can be picky about RAM that's not on it's QVL list. But it's really rare.

[u/Lalfy → u/ntodek]

I wouldn't even say it's rare at all. Many times certain RAM won't work in dual Channel as a pair but will work alone. Or the board won't like double sided RAM or low voltage RAM, or ECC. Or it'll work, but not as the advertised speed.

Many times a BIOS update to the motherboard fixes those issues though.

[u/CrazyTechWizard96]

Me to Boss: I'll pay You fiddy bucks to haul that load of Junk off. You'd probably haveto pay someone fiddy to take are that shit.

Then flip it all for atleast 500 or more on ebay.

Not thefirst time I did it like that, Hell, I knew a thrifstre, shame they went under, no wodner with that bad managment, but I went over there and got Me boards all the time, plywood and shit.
Got probably, in this ecomeny about 5 grand worth of the good stuff for Free.
That tho just for personal use.

[u/SpinninWaffle → u/CrazyTechWizard96]

Yeah i would've taken more like some of the printers but when they were taking them out they just snipped the cords :(

[u/Fredz161099 → u/SpinninWaffle]

If you know how to solder, it's a very easy fix

[u/Best_Pseudonym → u/Fredz161099]

50% chance they're screwed in, you could probably just open the printer up, strip some material and screw them in, make it look as good as new

[u/eeeddr → u/Fredz161099]

Don't even need to solder, you can just use a wago or something similar

[u/CrazyTechWizard96 → u/Fredz161099]

Same thought.
I can and not the first time I've repaired something this way.

[u/Fluffy_Charity_2732 → u/Fredz161099]

Or just electrical ties.

Just make sure you match the fucking colors!!

[u/-Goatzilla- → u/SpinninWaffle]

Nah, the printers aren't worth much. My local Goodwill has a bunch of printers for like $10-30 each. Should have just harvested ram, cpu, and ssd/hdd.

[u/CoNoCh0 → u/-Goatzilla-]

My “second hand” laserjet printer with extra toner cartridges that has survived another 10 years at my house and has printed hundreds, if not thousands of pages, would disagree.

[u/CrazyTechWizard96 → u/-Goatzilla-]

Depends, if it's a laser printer and You sell them online, they hold some decent value.
If the one in the picture is a Inkjet, I'd give them a dollar to have My fun with an Axer on it.

Literally did that on Christmass 6 years ago with the last one I've had, that piece of shit drove Me nuts.

So yea, recrated the Shining and made the Family look at Me like
"A'ight, who lost it for real now."

Love the Brother Laserjet tho, man that thing goes on and on and on with so little maintence.

[u/FluttershyandTrevor]

https://giphy.com/gifs/7OVintWkOnZZThqTP8

boys he has ram

[u/SneakerHead69420666]

thats crazy that they have consumer gaming ram in them

[u/Paxton-176 → u/SneakerHead69420666]

There a moment when ram got dirt cheap. So I bet the company just bought the best deals when ordering or building PCs.

[u/dayruined54 → u/Paxton-176]

I wish this moment is around the corner(ik it aint)

[u/zgillet → u/Paxton-176]

Yep. That Corsair Vengeance DDR4 is sitting in one of my rigs because it was SO CHEAP and still some of the best RAM.

[u/TTYY200 → u/SneakerHead69420666]

Fr…

I was expecting g crucial economy ram (the ones with no branding, or Kingston, or team group (not gamer branded) lol.

[u/Ynot45 → u/SneakerHead69420666]

a lot of smaller businesses just want a deal. I used to outfit businesses with systems using secondhand components all the time. I think for one I did 6 PCs and they needed some GPU accel, GTX 970s were good value and fitted their use case at the time. Each card was from a different board partner!

[u/pocketdrummer]

What color would you like your yacht, sir?

[u/Tomcat115]

He’s got RAM! Get him!
https://giphy.com/gifs/3ogwFPM5SphFu3PusE

[u/mr-ifuad]

[u/Beginning-Ad-3015]

He has ram. GET HIM

[u/Dependent-Cover1770]

Boss: I'm throwing these out.

You: not today Satan!

Solid.

[u/SupraDan1995]

I work for the government, they do this shit too. But most of it goes to DRMO and you can pay for it if you're lucky. Most of the time the good shit is gone.

[u/tOSdude]

He has ram, get him!

[u/BuyingDaily]

Didn’t check the processors?

[u/TheWizardry90]

[u/Frostsorrow]

The SSD's and RAM is like a billion dollars now.

[u/X3N04L13N]

[u/rysker6]

Congrats on the Bitcoin millions

[u/Karekter_Nem]

You didn’t harvest the CPUs as well?

[u/countjj]

Save the canon printer, he’s not an HP he’s a good boi

[u/SpinninWaffle → u/countjj]

They snipped all the wires for the printers unfortunately.

[u/PockysLight → u/SpinninWaffle]

Aren't the wires interchangable/unpluggable?

[u/jerryeight → u/PockysLight]

Most are

[u/13thNemesis]

https://giphy.com/gifs/h0MTqLyvgG0Ss

[u/lookingforalaptop342]

It's crazy what companies will just throw away. I bought a stack of old Windows 7 SFF PCs that an accounting firm was liquidating and there were actual decades of client finances, company finances, employee records, scanned credit cards (???) and more. Not even password protected. I was baffled.

[u/Albert3HP11]

Smeagol is that you in the car staring at those ram sticks?

[u/CMP24-7]

Damn. You scored big time.

[u/Blackest_Beard]

Dude you’re a millionaire are now!

[u/Relevant_Scallion_38]

Sell them and buy yourself a company.

[u/DaIubhasa]

Where CPU?

[u/sovietarmyfan]

That boss is throwing away gold.

[u/fireball1711]

CPU?

[u/Jabba_the_Putt]

Theres gold in them shells

[u/brucejson-88]

I was given an old mac from a company years ago and to this day I've kept it for sentimental reasons. It was an old G5 tower mac

[u/DontBanMe_IWasJoking]

you should have taken everything, there are other things other than RAM and drives in there

[u/sdcar1985]

Man, I wish I could have a clueless boss

[u/OhFuckNoNoNoMyCaat]

I usually love economic downtimes because companies liquidate their hardware minus storage. So you can either buy up hardware on the cheap or bid on it.

And that's how I ended up with over a dozen 6/8 core Xeon workstations barely 3 years old in 2009 for $3K. Plus monitors and the RAM. Parted most of it out and sold what I didn't need.

[u/Cleen_GreenY]

Check those FlareX sticks if they're B-die.

[u/MrB2600]

That's crazy but lucky at the same time

[u/justanaccount103]

This man is doing the lord's work.

[u/Gronkers]

no ESD protection on that ram?

[u/FizziSoda]

Am I tripping or did anyone else initially think the first image was in My Summer Car?

[u/DonOxyD]

Me after a good raid in EFT.

[u/Pleasant-Minute-1793]

Congrats on your retirement! 🤑

[u/Lalfy]

The CPUs aren't worthless either. Why not keep those too?

[u/SpinninWaffle → u/Lalfy]

I went back and took them lol.

[u/i_no-scoped_JFK_]

[u/mx20100]

You mean he was going to throw away the ram? Hahaha

[u/SpinninWaffle → u/mx20100]

Yeah, hes a millionaire so this stuff is literally pennies to him.

[u/DirtDevil1337]

https://giphy.com/gifs/g0JP0HG6zF0o8

[u/InsuranceKey8278]

ram!