What is it worth? Hard Drives, RAM, and Chips

also depends if you are selling for scrap or as working items for collectors....scrap is the lowest pricing you will get UNLESS the item in question is not something people are buying like say a working single core P4 (just scrap that).

Both places mentioned already will give you all the info you need, but certainly check working vs scrap prices if you can.

And if reselling hard drives remember you are responsible to make certain they have been properly wiped. 73, Mike

Originally Posted by Sirscrapalot

This!

Folks reselling hard drives...C.Y.A. I know you old timers know the above, but for the new folks who may have never thought about it before should pay attention to this tip. Even the hobbyists and part-timers out there.

Wipe the drive before you resell it to someone one ebay, or wherever you do your selling. Especially if your dealing with any kind of medical type office(Dentist, hospital, etc) of personal info. It's not worth the punishment, an it does take very long at all to wipe a drive.

Good tip Mike. An one we should all be reminded of when dealing with peoples/businesses personal info.

Sirscrapalot - Doesn't like lawsuits or fines. Especially ones that can be easily avoided.

ALL OF THIS...also remember, ANY drive with personal medical info like a hospital, doctor office, dentists and even places like lay firms fall under HIPAA and MUST be wiped according to their standards. NOTE this does NOT mean a simple "reformat". It is more complicated and you need to read some older threads on the subject. Typically you need more robust software and will wipe it anywhere from 3-7 times depending on the specifications of the business. You also will most likely need to provide a COD (certificate of destruction). If you are unfamiliar with this stuff, you need to get educated quickly. There are a number of threads on here regarding the subject and they will point you in the right directions.

With all due respect ... it's kinda making a mountain out of a molehill and feeding into all of the irrational fears about hard drives.

It's simple dimple. If you've an amateur and you've got an old hard drive that you need to take out of service just whack it with a hammer.

Easier yet ... just pick a couple of the little square thingies ( SMD's) off the circuit board with the point of a pocket knife.

Everything has to be darn near perfect in order for a hard drive to work. A couple of little changes and the drive is toast.

HIPPA and all of the regulations are the accepted methods for people that are regularly engaged tech stuff. If someone is paying you to provide a data destruction service then those are the standards you are expected to adhere to for doing the job.

my point was RESELLING hard drives there Scrappah. If you aren't reselling then of course pull the boards and then sell the rest.

Originally Posted by HipoGear

If all you do is remove or damage the circuit board, what's to stop someone from putting the platters in another hard drive and reading the data?

it is pretty difficult...you have to have the EXACT hard drive controller board AND if you get the platters dirty at all, they can be come unuseable. I mean I GUESS you can do it, but that is alot of controller boards to keep around and you need to be pretty motivated of the info needs to be pretty sensitive. HIPAA businesses will require the COD anyways for their records (their insurance generally requires it), so you will need to show physical destruction or 3-7 pass wiping COD. The hospital I serviced wouldn't even let me have the drives at all...they ONLY allowed physical destruction by the national document destruction company they used. It was a hard drive shredder, so you basically got 1/2" chopped pieces.

^^^^^

I would definitely second that. The platters are all but useless.

Even if you could somehow locate a logic board from the same lot of hard drives that was manufactured over ten years ago it still wouldn't work.

The best way i can think to explain it is that every hard drive is like a snowflake. No two are exactly the same. There are a specific set of instructions of how the controller is supposed to operate that particular drive. That set of instructions is stored in permanent memory on a memory chip on the board.

In order to transplant a new logic board onto the drive, and have it work, you also have to transfer that firmware from the old board to the new board. That's doable with the right lab equipment but if the original board is missing just one tiny SMD it raises the level of difficulty significantly.

I kinda dumbed it down to make it understandable but that would be the easiest case scenario. It gets worse from there. You're looking at at least a thousand dollars to have a data recovery lab collect data from a non-functional hard drive.

Let's say that you whacked with a hammer and bent the platters 1/1000 th. of an inch out of true ??? That's a hard call ... might not be able to recover the data at all.

If the platters were removed and a data recovery specialist had no idea of where they came from ??? Maybe .... but i couldn't imagine what the costs would be.

I guess the point i'm trying to make is that the whole thing becomes an absurd concern once you understand the technical difficulty and the costs involved in recovering data from a drive that's been intentionally damaged.

The OP is just a guy that came across a few old computer parts. Doesn't know what he's got and is wondering if they might have some value. The simple answer is that for him .... there just isn't very much value there. The hard drives are actually a liability cause once you own them ... you have the responsibility to do the right thing with em'.

That's an easy two second fix with a BFH or a pocket knife.