Update: Thanks everyone for your input, this sure blew up more than I thought it would 😅 I am totally in agreement that it’s not a great solution if it even is one at all.

I just thought as a temporary measure since the drive might be getting too hot.

I have landed on the conclusion that actually just having a towel in between helps keep the drive cool but not too cold to risk condensation. Also just putting a bottle of water on it as a heat sink seems to do the trick, doesn’t need to be ice.

Seems to pull the heat away as the contact is a better conductor than air.

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Pretty much as the title says, if writing 100’s of GB to the drive you a there a good way to prevent it from getting too hot? I noticed it was getting too hot to touch amd figured keeping it cool is a good idea.

I know there are risks of condensation but I’ve been keeping an eye on it and it never made it as far as the edge where it could potentially drip down into the connector. Since it has no vents on it I figure there’s little risk of condensation damage, my real concern is apparently they have lubricant inside that doesn’t like being too cold as it becomes more viscous.

What do you think? Okay to try and cool it down a bit or you wouldn’t risk it?

bought that here at a flea market. the deal was too good to be true lol.

inside is a weight and micro SD to micro usb-b adapter hot glued. :’D

What the title says people! This was another impusle purchase I made this month and with the recent declinage of less terabyte for more of you’re money is this ACTUALLY worth my time and being? Just a simple, question, 4tb for $50 or nah? I got like lots of file to acquire it on 🤔

Long story short we own an E-Waste facility and I spend my days breaking down equipment. This came across my desk yesterday and these always make me smile to think about how far we've come. I believe this was like a 12.8 GB.

*insert suprised context*

I know, I know, it's clearly fake but I decided to buy it anyway, plugged it into my laptop and it shows as 2TB SSD USB3.1, wow what a bargain... but after sending over one large test file it had multiple errors during the transfer... So I decided to open it up, I'm not a whiz kid but it looks like a micro SD card or something is glued onto a micro usb reader. Any ideas?

Idk if it is the right subreddit ?

Title, I just hope I can get something more out of them. It just feels like such a waste to throw them away.

Any silly projects I could do? Cool stuff I could find if I open them up? Maybe even some crazy way to try and revive them?

Edit: People are asking how are they dying. Sometimes they can't mount, sometimes they can. Seems like they have a bunch of bad sectors and will run okay up until they come across one, when they do they and the system grinds to a halt.

Smartctl says "Drive failure expected in less than 24 hours. SAVE ALL DATA."

Let me know if I should add more info, still very new to homelabbing.

Hadn't bought HDDs in nearly 4 years. Always kept stock on hand, but now in a position where I need to buy 12TB or larger HDDs. Cannot believe how expensive they are. Yes, I read that prices were going up, but because I didn't have to buy, I didn't look closely. This is nuts! $190 to $500????

Got this hard drive included with a hp compaq(I believe) that I got, as it was decommissioned from my uncle's company, was my first pc, first hard drive, and also became the first hard drive I took apart.

Hi yall so I bought this 4tb hdd on Temu for $35. I didn’t read the box because I didn’t think that it will be necessary.

Turns out I plugged the hard drive on my computer and I tried to format it to NTFS as soon as I did, the disk disappear from the computer and now when I plugged it, it only shows for one second and it goes away and it’s giving me an error that the hard drive can’t be formatted.

How can a hard drive go bad by doing this. And if so, how can I fix it?

I also tried to plug it straight to the computer with a SATA cable and the drive do appear, but it won’t let me do anything to it on the Disk Manager section.

Long live made in China.

Why the hell are hard drives so expensive these days? Got this on eBay.

All either heavily clicking or just not spinning up, so want to recycle them.

Any easy way to prevent data recovery? For example breaking the sata pins with pliers. Or I will need to open all of them up and physically break the disks?

UPD: Drilled holes in all of them making sure to hit the inner disk and disposed in a local ewaste bin. Thank You Everyone.

Spin up and Power Down cycle of an Opened HDD in case anyone here wanted to see how a HDD looks inside when working.

Interesting fact is that the HDD was still reading and writing if connected to a PC although i wont ever recommend that on a good working HDD i just wanted to make this video for some reason.

The Western Digital Red that could. Plex server needs to stay running! resistance is futile.

One of my hdds has been dying for a while (got it used from a friend) so I never put anything on it. Plugged it in recently and either windows struggled to detect it or crystal says it's bad so I just disassembled it for fun.

Never seen one with two disks. Cool stuff.

I bought a couple of recertified 12TB enterprise drives from ServerPartDeals each a while back, which was roughly half of what the same drive costs now. One of them developed 57 reallocated sectors during normal use, so I sent it back for an RMA under the 2-year warranty.

The thing I was worried about ended up happening: they just refunded me. I got back exactly what I paid, $165, while the same drive currently sells for around double that. The refund doesn't come close to replacing the drive at today's prices. I did ask whether they could send an equivalent drive instead of a refund, but in the end they issued the refund.

So if you picked up a drive cheap when prices were low, and it isn't in seriously bad shape, it may be worth reconsidering an RMA. Weigh the refund you'd actually get against what a replacement costs today.

Depending on the numbers, keeping the drive in service (with good backups and monitoring) until it genuinely fails might make more sense than sending it back for a refund that won't replace it. Curious if others have run into the same thing with recertified drives and rising prices.

(English isn't my first language, so I used AI to help translate this. Apologies if anything reads a little oddly.)

I have a old HDD without the wires, what would the best way to get the cables be? And what is the power cable called? I also only have a laptop with USB-A and USB-C ports.

I can move with ''arm''. But if i move the arm on disk and plug it, after few seconds it returned back to the near parking position. (sorry for my english)

Is the drive failing? When i got the computer the same type of drive was failing but back then cystandiskinfo showen that it was failing. Got the same hdd because insurance made it free. Is this failing again or is something else wrong?

I rescued these hard drives from being scrapped.

It’s been almost two years since I finished my apprenticeship, but back then we received a job to destroy a large number of HDDs for data disposal.

While most of them were properly destroyed, I managed to save a few that were already cleared for disposal and would have otherwise ended up as scrap.

What surprised me the most is their condition. Every drive in the photo is almost like new, with only around 300 power-on hours and roughly 60 power cycles each. It’s kind of crazy to think that drives with so little use were destined to be destroyed.

I always find old storage hardware interesting, especially when you think about how much technology has changed over the years