Should I reclaim the boards or recycle the whole thing? Hard drives.

[Calidus]

I have a collection of old hard drives with either bad sectors or have other problems making them unusable. They are all recognised still so the boards on the drives work, I have seen in the past listings on ebay selling boards taken off hard drives and wonder if this is viable and useful to do, while recycling the rest of the components. Or should I just recycle the whole drives including the boards?

 

Are the working boards even useful for someone with an otherwise working drive but there board is faulty, can they even be interchanged if they are the same model?

 

I vaguely remember an old linus video that visisted a data recovery place that could possibly benefit from these fixing drives, but I might be mis remembering.

 

In short, I'm clearing out clutter and wondering what to do with them that would be the most environmentally friendly approach. Especially as boards aren't the easiest to recycle.

[Levent]

Try selling them on ebay as is.

[BondiBlue]

I would just securely wipe them and sell them as is. It's rare, but not unheard of, that someone can use a board from a different drive without swapping components. I had a drive die from one of my machines many years ago, and I happened to have another identical drive with the same firmware, and sure enough it works fine. Someone could get some use from them.