What to do... [with old electronic devices]

[onesixright]

With old electronics.

I have a few boxes full of ISDN telephones, ADSL modems, DECT telephones and other old electronics.

Amy thoughts?

Thanks!


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[Halcyon]

Post pictures of them to the EEVblog forum? :-)

[Zucca]

1) Edit your title: What to do with old electronic devices.

2) Soldering/Hot air SMD practise boards. Better to dick around with junk and then do the job right in critical missions.
(There is no restore button on the iron)

3) Donor boards?

4) If you have no storage space in the Lab. Ebay let it go for 1€ or more, better than the junk yard.

Z

[Daixiwen]

If they have 0603 100nF capacitors, it will soon be profitable to remove them and sell them 

[onesixright]

1) Edit your title: What to do with old electronic devices.

Click bait? :-)

[Zucca]

Click bait? :-)

Curious people like me will click, smart people with no time for games will roll their eyes and move on.
Your bait is missing some smart guys out there.

My personal opinion, nothing to be worried off or irritated. Easy.

[Zucca]

Thanks 

[onesixright]

Post pictures of them to the EEVblog forum? :-)

Yeah, just for the heck of it, I should do that.

Its a lot 
- telephones(DECT, ISDN, VOIP)
- motherboards
- disk drivers (IDE/SATA)
- modems (ADSL)
- power cables
- utp cables
- flat cable (for IDE drives)
- pic cards
- isa cards
- old dell servers (19" 10x!)
- old pc's
- laser printer/copy (RICOH)
- some old lcd monitors
- PS3, PS4
- Switches
- KVM Switch (2:1 and 1 x 8 or 16 ports need to check).
- ...

Man, could start a 2nd hand shop!   

[onesixright]

Thanks 

For you, anytime! 

[onesixright]

If they have 0603 100nF capacitors, it will soon be profitable to remove them and sell them 

Ah, really? How is that?

[bob225]

0603 100nf caps are unobtainium in anything more than a few hundred and there 5-9 times the price of what they use to be

[Eka]

Sounds like you horded more than I did. I still want to send Dave an old portable I got on a dumpster dive for a teardown, it's 100% working, but it's a few hundred $$$ to send it internationally.

When I've been feeling brainless lately I've been stripping all the old electronic junk I have to use the bits in art.

[AndyC_772]

If any of it is interesting, then Ebay.

If not, then it's WEEE. Dispose of it responsibly, and move on.

Space is too valuable to have it occupied with junk.

[technix]

If any of it is interesting, then Ebay.

If not, then it's WEEE. Dispose of it responsibly, and move on.

Space is too valuable to have it occupied with junk.

Second that, sell those, be it a second hand shop, Free Geek donations, or eBay. Don't sell the disk drives though, as they might still have some data recoverable on them. For the motherboards, PC parts and the Dell server check if they still work and whether there is an upgrade path. Anything running Intel Nehalem or AMD Bulldozer series and newer probably are up to speed for even the latest computing needs, ditto higher end Intel Yonah's. If some of those parts can assemble into a working machine that runs Ubuntu 18.04 desktop, you might be want to keep it as an HTPC or as a hand-me-down computer.

[Eka]

My tech cutoff was if it wasn't significantly faster than a Raspberry Pi 3, it got scrapped. Unless it was otherwise interesting like the Compaq lugable portable complete with 8" green screen tube monitor, full height 5.25" hard disk, full height 5.25" floppy, Hayes modem, and a few serial and parallel port cards. This thing is a real arm stretcher. I'm also keeping an old Gateway 2000 portable computer, complete with tiny pop out track ball. Old hard disks are getting pulled apart, and the platters will be part of a light sculpture. I may also do something with some of the arm assemblies. The cases, being made of aluminum, are going off to be recycled. PCBs got stripped of parts for a post apocalypse chip merchant costume idea.

The reason for the Raspberry Pi 3 cutoff is mostly energy use. A RPi 3 will use much less energy than an old PC would, and they are vary capable.

[james_s]

Second that, sell those, be it a second hand shop, Free Geek donations, or eBay. Don't sell the disk drives though, as they might still have some data recoverable on them.

Who cares? People have gotten really paranoid about this. If the drive is new enough to plug into a modern PC then it's easy to wipe it so that nobody will be able to recover any data, and if it's older than that then it probably doesn't have any data on it that anyone would want anyway.

The paranoia started due to clueless people disposing of drives without even formatting them, simply deleting files and/or not realizing there's bits and pieces of stuff stored in odd places like cache files. Secure erase that writes over every block will render it impossible to recover the data.

[bob225]

Unless you do a 7-9 time zero fill, data is still recoverable if you know what your doing, Even dod/mod spec formatting isn't sufficient these days

i have handled data and drives with confidential data, the only way to make sure there unusable is to put 2 holes in the drive 1 through the top into the platters (usually shatters the platters) and the other through the pcb

commercial data has a value

[onesixright]

Thanks for the comments!

I build a specific product for data erasure, so im pretty "aware" of that.


Its just laziness. We moved all our physical servers into the VM realm (~ 7 years ago), and I didn't want to bootup each server and do the wipe. Even I developed a pretty nifty product for it :-) But I should.

Moreover, its the scale of it all. Someone called me a hoarder, well I guess, in a way its true Although I don't see myself like one. I just find it a pity to throw good working stuff in the trash. Nobody uses a DECT, ISDN telephones, the servers (32 bit) probably have some descent spare parts (like PSU, memory). Anyone in for a 10 year old ADSL modem? Dont think so   The printer works, but it comes from a era without USB and a NIC costed att 1100 USD.   

We are moving in a few months to (finally!) our "new" house, and I just need to deal with this sh!t

I wil make a list of most of it and throw it in "Buy/Sell/Wanted", if someone likes something just shoot me a PM.

[Dielectric]

I like to scavenge the odd-shaped rare-earth magnets from old  HDDs.  They look cool holding stuff up on my filing cabinet.

You could then run the platter(s) on a belt sander to erase them if you're into that kind of thing.  They make bad frisbees, but may be a nice coaster if you put some sticky feet or felt on the underside.

[james_s]

Unless you do a 7-9 time zero fill, data is still recoverable if you know what your doing, Even dod/mod spec formatting isn't sufficient these days

i have handled data and drives with confidential data, the only way to make sure there unusable is to put 2 holes in the drive 1 through the top into the platters (usually shatters the platters) and the other through the pcb

commercial data has a value

I would challenge you to recover useful data from a drive that has been formatted and overwritten. I'd like to see someone accomplish it on less than a 5 figure budget. It's worth thinking about motivation here, what are you going to recover from the PCB that is of any value? A few bytes of garbled data that somehow stuck around in the cache RAM? How valuable do you think the data on the drive from a typical home PC is? What are you going to get there? A few passwords? SS number? There are paths of far lower resistance, I know if I wanted to steal data I wouldn't bother trying to recover it from wiped hard drives, the potential reward is far less than the cost.

Social engineering, keyloggers, disgruntled employees, all the various corporate leaks that occur online, card skimmers, mail theft, this is how data gets out, not people using heroic efforts to scrape it from discarded hard drives.

[bob225]

scrap all the pcb's, A eatx board may have 2 oz of gold as well as silver and no end of copper, stripping wire can be tedious but its still a few quid

As for data recovery I have pulled data from a hard drive that was formatted multiple times with recovery software only

drilling the pcb means it can not be used for data recovery of other drives - drive arrays are usually the same make and model of drive

[james_s]

Why would you want to prevent a PCB from being used for data recovery of other drives? Most data recovery is legitimate, it's a big business recovering valuable data from failed drives. Very, very few people with the skills to do that have any interest in harvesting data they are not authorized to access, that's just a far less efficient way of surreptitiously acquiring data.

[Eka]

For secure erasing, I have a proper wipe program that will overwrite it with random data enough times so that the old data is way to small of signal to be read anymore due to many layers of random signal that are stronger. Yeah, I can think of ways to still recover the data, but it would take serious custom equipment.

If I really want to make it unrecoverable, I put it in the the neighbor's induction furnace. Immediately the platters are 100% magnetically saturated in alternating polarities, as the polarity of the resonate tank circuit heating the charge is swapped thousands times a second. Very quickly the magnetic oxide layer burns off because it absorbs the energy magnetically too and thus heats up very fast. A few minutes later the aluminum case and platters are melting from the eddy currents induced into them. After the first couple melt, I'll just drop in additional ones into the crucible and they melt fast. When done I'll pour it out into an ingot mold so it can be recycled as contaminated aluminum. The HD motors with their iron and copper will contaminate the aluminum. Also the screws, bearings, and other metal bits will get melted into it. The flexible PCB material burns off. I do remove the controller boards as they are an easily removed contaminate. They so spark and pop nicely when subjected to the fields in the induction furnace. All those traces make nice antennas to couple a few kW of energy into the chips.

[bitseeker]

Post pictures of them to the EEVblog forum? :-)

Yeah, just for the heck of it, I should do that.

Its a lot 
- telephones(DECT, ISDN, VOIP)
- motherboards
- disk drivers (IDE/SATA)
- modems (ADSL)
- power cables
- utp cables
- flat cable (for IDE drives)
- pic cards
- isa cards
- old dell servers (19" 10x!)
- old pc's
- laser printer/copy (RICOH)
- some old lcd monitors
- PS3, PS4
- Switches
- KVM Switch (2:1 and 1 x 8 or 16 ports need to check).
- ...

Man, could start a 2nd hand shop!   

Yeah, post them in the Buy/Sell/Wanted forum: https://www.eevblog.com/forum/buysellwanted/

Someone might need it for completing their vintage collection or for parts to repair something.