Hard drives are an integral part of the computer industry. They're used in desktops, laptops, servers, workstations and storage arrays. It's also well known that hard drives have a limited lifespan. What may be less known is that hard drive recycling is possible — and that it could be a good idea for your business to recycle your old equipment rather than send it to landfill or scrap yards.
Blog Post Body: If you're looking into how to recycle old hard drives, you've come to the right place! We'll take you through five steps for how to do so with minimum hassle and maximum cost savings.
1. How to recognize when it makes sense to recycle hard drives
If you have a lot of data on hard drives and you're not sure how to get rid of it, the first thing to do is to pull the data off of the hard drives and store it in another format.For our purposes, we’ll be looking at high-capacity USB drives. Here’s how to do it.
Step 1:
Identify the Location of Your Hard Drives. When you’ve got your old hard drives, find out where they’re stored. You might have them in a cabinet on a shelf or tucked away in a closet somewhere. Visualize where your old drives are now by placing a large, heavy item — like a suitcase, dresser or a dead tree — next to your old drives and tracing the path it took to get there. This will give you an idea of where your hard drives may be.
Step 2:
Disassemble Your Hard Drive. In our case, we’re going to disassemble our drives into their individual components. Remove the hard drive from its case and find the SATA or SCSI controller. You want to do this empty-handed, removing the drive from its packaging.
Step 3:
Remove the Hard Drives. You may have noticed that your drives may be emblazoned with a recycling symbol but don’t be alarmed! On some drives, this symbol simply denotes that they’re larger than 4GB — so just look for the upper left corner and if there is one, remove it! Once your drives are out of the packaging, turn off your magnetic object, unplug your connectors and carefully remove each hard drive from its packaging. You may want to use a special tool (preferably a punch and mallet) to carefully remove the parts from the packaging. Carefully remove the hard drive from the connector and tiny rubber seal. Place it on a clean, dry surface and carefully remove the rubber grommet that prevents the SATA or SCSI controller from sliding out of the slot.
2. How to prepare your hard drives for recycling
When your hard drives have reached the end of their lives, you have a couple of options on what to do with them. You can either send them off and have them recycled, or you can attempt to wipe them yourself.These are the steps we’re going to walk you through today.
We’ll start at the top of the ladder: Seagate. According to a Fortune article, it was estimated that they had recycled about 19% of their hard drives that were sent in for recycling. However, the hard drive recycling figures that Seagate released in 2019 came in at only 26%. The difference might be down to the low volume of shipments. Each year they try to send out fewer factory-sealed, pre-built units. However, that doesn’t explain why only 26% were successfully recycled in 2019. Seagate said that their most popular product category was external storage and they could easily sell less than half of their pre-built hard drives for recycling.
Many believe that Seagate makes half the profits of EMC and Western Digital combined. When Seagate releases an updated hard drive that’s thicker and more expensive, these sales figures might be even greater. Seagate also makes most of their money from licensing their brand name to other manufacturers, which means that it’s often difficult for them to make money on their own products. If Seagate can’t make money on their own products, they rely on recycling to make a profit.
All of the hard drives listed on the right are the type of storage that could be sent to recycling centers. This includes thumb drives, which are commonly found in the Apple iPhone and many workstations. These are usually single-sided, have mechanical parts that can wear and would be difficult to reassemble, and would make an excellent candidate for recycling. Dropping off old thumb drives at a recycling center does have some unique challenges, though.
3. Where to deliver your hard drive
The best place to deliver your hard drive is to the buyer’s home or work. This way, you can confirm the address is accurate and that the buyer can receive the package without any problems.
State and local governments across the US offer programs where individuals can turn in their obsolete equipment at no fee. Zoom in to your city or county says “you have 10 days to exchange your hardware and $10 includes recycling fee.” Most local governments also provide free dropoff recycling service for computers, monitors, printers — anything you no longer use or are in need of disposing of responsibly.
Still don’t feel comfortable? Download our app. Any item can be sent in for recycling — including your old tech you no longer need and still retain parts for. All you have to do is register, pick a time slot, and schedule a time to come in and pick up your recycling. After the 10 day period, you’ll receive a confirmation e-mail from us (simply make sure to check the confirm spam box) and it will begin. Hard drives are dropped off at home, businesses and other locations throughout the community.
Though precious metals will not be recycled with your old hard drives, there is a convenient way to get them to a safe place and reduce your waste. You can also ship hardware containing precious metal (including jewelry and watches) to a recycling centre near you that accepts laptop and desktop hard drives. You can access relevant recycling centres on the Digitizing Station Network — an important resource for anyone in the business of recovering valuables.
If you are connecting your old drives to external hard drives to maximize benefits for your business, remember that data security and redundancy are important considerations within your network. To be safe, ensure that your preferred networked storage solutions are set up and tested before connecting them to external devices.
4. What is the cost of hard drive recycling?
According to the United States Environmental Protection Agency, there are over 90 million hard drives in the US alone that will become obsolete in the next few years. That’s a lot of hard drives that need to be recycled! The cost of hard drive recycling can vary widely depending on the size of the hard drive and what kind of electronics it contains.Some recycling centers charge as little as $2 per hard drive while others can require as much as $20 per drive. There are also other costs involved with recycling hard drives. Certain hard drive manufacturers (like Seagate) create recycling centers to handle specific parts of the hard drive like the head, if it’s a mechanical hard drive. It’s important to know exactly what you are recycling, some recyclers only accept certain types of devices while others accept all hard drives (including those with removable media like SD cards, CD and DVDs). You may need to get recycling letters or permits from local, state or even national governments in order to recycle certain solid state drives. That’s mostly because of the way that they work. Solid state drives have no moving parts and can only be recycled using special equipment.
Hard drives (also spelled HDD, HDD, HDEF etc.) hold large data files like videos, audios, maps, photos and more. These files and more are usually stored in the form of a hard drive chip called a platter. The platters are made up of small individual sectors or “blocks” about 0.5 to 4 gigabytes in size. The sectors are where data (or sometimes specific files) are stored. A hard drive can hold a maximum of around 5 petabytes of data.
Depending on many factors, if a hard drive is 60 years old and still in good working order, you can expect to have around 150 NP (not perfectly documented, but hehehe) bits of information, that’s called the "paring limit.
5. The environmental benefits of hard drive recycling
There’s a big problem with hard drive recycling, and that’s the fact that some hard drives still have data on them after they’ve been recycled. The data on the drives can be accessed by anyone with the right tools, opening a big security hole for your business.We’ll also show you how to set up your own recycling program without paying someone to do it.
If you become aware of your company’s old hard drives laying around, the first step is to go to your company’s network equipment management (or Manageability) center. Hardware recycling centers will generally have a Hard Drive Recycling page where you can pick up old drives and everything you need to properly dispose of them.
If this is the case for your company’s network equipment, get everything ready, including computers and monitors that may have data on them. Before you leave your house, note where you’ll be picking up the old drives. This location may also be referred to as a pick-up location. Also, let any tech-savvy coworkers know where you’ll be picking up drives and which office they need to go to.
Once you’ve got the equipment prepared, head over to your recycling center or HQ of your company. Retail outlets are the best place for hard drives because they often have pick-up machines and can extract the drives quickly. Most data recovery/disposal facilities will also have pick-ups available.
When you head over to the recycling center, be sure to take a few minutes to make an appointment and schedule it in. If you’re not picking up any drives for the whole week, you might need to set-up a scheduled appointment with the recycling center. Establish boundaries on the schedule you’ll be able to make it to — a time you’ll be able to get in, hang out for a bit, grab some food and drive off.Hard Drive Recycling The Ultimate Guide.txt
