If there is anyone out there, Good morning all.
In the garage this first day of February to fire up a test motherboard and process some hard drives that have been sitting in a box for a long time, some are from my old machines, some acquired when I bought a massive amount of electronics from a technician who was moving to Ottawa and some that I have salvaged recently from older machines destined for the landfill.
The test setup is simple enough, a vintage Asus P8H61-M LE/CSM with Intel i5-2400 and 8GB of DDR3 running a "live" version of Linux Mint from a thumb drive. The hard drives are SATA and I use gparted to kill off old partitions and create a new one, after that I run disks and do the SMS extended smart tests to see if the drive is ok, so far (and I will update as I go along) two drives have passed with flying colours, two have failed and are back in the pipe to the electronics recycle depot in town, in a box I have many more, it will be a repetitive morning, but I'm not really doing any real work myself except drinking coffee and having some snacks along the way.
The reason why I am doing this is (a) find drives I can sell, but sell them in a safe manner with no data on them (b) find drives that are bad that have been living rent free in our house for years now and recycle them (c) completely purge any of our old drives that may contain sensitive, personal data, you know, family pancake recipes and the like and occasional photos of ladies bits.
It is a reminder to all of you out there, if you exist, to remove your hard drives when you sell or recycle your old computers, you can purge your data and reuse or simply take out your anger about the planet in general by beating the hard drives to bits, drilling holes in their brains and bashing the daylights out of them.
Ok, I'm off to see if the next one has passed or failed and update the count, rinse repeat.
