Written by If you are like me, you may have a drawer full of old laptop harddrives, USB cables, SD card, PCI cards, PCMIA cards, and maybe a few motherboards. I don’t worry about it too much, as I used to have a trunk full of these odd items…that I never used again.
What you can do with old drives is quickly turn them into external storage devices for on-site backup, storage while traveling, or for sharing large amounts of files with friends and family when they visit your faraway abode. I’ve used this Sabrent enclosure that requires no screws and is right around ten bucks. Oh and the USB cable that comes with it is the standard USB 3.0 on both sides, so you can reuse the cable on other devices without worrying about micro-, mini-, or any other metric-prefix-type-USB.
Thankfully I am down to just four external harddrives: one 160GB, two 500GB, and one 1TB. There is really no point in keeping the 160, so I used the command line utility shred to overwrite any extraneous data.
If you have old electronics (even harddrives) you can recycle them at Best Buy or Staples so they don’t end up in a landfill somewhere.
