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Platters make good coasters
I would take those and the adhesive rubber feet that you would get with switches and make coasters out of them to give away.
I've done this for years and it works great.
What
Curious about the age of the oldest one
I started collecting in probably 2007, so manufactured before that for sure.
This is cool, but honestly kind of a deranged question to ask.
Fair, my home office is a monument to too much free time, a hoarding habit for ewaste, and a wife who works weekends and overnights.
This is just a less gross version of "DAE store their piss in jars so they can commemorate their unitary secretions"?
baffled glance...wot?
Does anybody else harvest the teeth of their victims and put them on a keychain?
Or fashion bow ties from their testicles. . ?
Every time, without fail, though I haven't decided what I want to do with them yet.
And here I thought I had a lot of hdd platter coaster's.
I have like 15 over the past decade and now I realize I am an ant to OP
I used to. Magnets on old hard drives were better. Any drive I've taken apart over the last ten years or so are smaller and more brittle. Not as worth taking apart.
I used to collect AOL cds. I had a stack a few feet high. I was going to make some sort of artwork out of them.
I don't want to ruin your fun, but the last time I saw a post like this on reddit, the top comment was: "Don't open hard drives. They contain micro particles from wear and tear, that are as dangerous as asbestos."
Edit: I found the post and comment. The issue mentioned was the cobalt. https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/17il3i3/comment/k6veo9c/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
Edit2: I went and searched a bit. This meta-analysis says they found no increased cancer risk for exposure to cobalt particles. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0273230021001288
If they were remotely any threat to human population it would of been banned.
If your hard drive has dust it would've failed a long time ago. They are designed to be extremely clean. The head is like a 747 flying an inch above the ground. It sounds like an urban myth to scare people.
I have never seen any dust or particles, they are pristine looking inside and no film or anything when touching internals. But I did some checking, drives have an air filter to catch wear particles to preserve clean head to disc contact, so those micro particles are hopefully trapped in the filter, and the risk is super low because of the tiny amount available, compared to clouds of asbestos dust in a home reno.
I did a quick bit of research on this, and I wasn't really able to find anything to corroborate this. I'd be interested to know if there is a proper source to this though
Edit: there can be some concern for those metal particles, although this is no different for any metal dust by the looks of things https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/do-old-hard-drives-contain-toxic-materials.1623183/#post-11646780
The posting essentially says there is no risk than tosses out mercury and lead vapors which don't exist in a HDD. Then it talks about the lead in solder. You'd have to vigorously rub and handle the solder on circuit boards to get any amount on your skin worth worrying about and then you just wash your hands. That risk is true of all boards that don't use low or lead free solder. The whole comment is very hypothetical.
Nice : )
I'm much more interested in your kit in the background.
That is a self-made soldering kit box I made when I was in college and had to haul it around a lot. I have actually been meeting to replace it with something more permanent now that I'm a grown up with my own house. I have an air flow soldering rig which doesn't really have a home, and I could have a much better use of space. I have my brocade ICX6610-24 next to that which I've been programming for way too long, and a whole bunch of 3D printer parts on top of that.
Thought it was just me. Used to have at least twice this many in my old office:
That's rad, and you did an amazing job keeping them whole. Recently I have been wrapping them in cloth, then the kids form clay around them for various fridge and office magnets.
That's a good idea. Yeah, the trick I discovered in getting them off the mounting bracket without the chrome plating peeling is to grab each end of the bracket with vice grips and/or pliers (after you unscrew it from the drive) and just bend it down and away from the magnet. They usually come off in one piece that way, too.
Cool, I'll try this next time. So far the least damaging way I've tried is putting the thing in hot water. The magnet and the base expand by different amounts and it is relatively easy to pry the magnet off. But the thing cools down quickly so it takes a few tries.
I've done some of that, recently I have an old putty knife and I will put it right against the crack and just hammer it which will unstick it enough that I can pull it off. Newer drives definitely have weaker magnets than some of my much older ones.
... I didn't but I guess I could start?
A common public toilet till machine has a keyhole that looks like a coin slot. Turns out, HDD magnets are the perfect shape to fish out any coins mistakenly thrown in there.
Public toilet till machines - we don't have that in the US. Can you show a example - potentially even fishing out some coins? Super curious!
I wish I got that many hard drives just so I could do this.
Challenge accepted. I'll post our collection tomorrow! I used some magnets to hold up a white board last week too. Hahaha
My daughter's drawings are held on my fridge with old HDD magnets.