[ale] Off Topic, hard drive shredder

[Tim Watts]

Gotta say I'm a little disappointed at all the reasonable responses to
this.

There was a time when any mention of disk destruction would inevitably
spark a multi-day round table of C4 and other pyrotechnic fantasies. And
would eventually devolve into some kind of weird topic involving
lubricants before someone would finally step in and say "Wow, what just
happened here?"

What happened ALE? <sniffle/>


On Fri, 2011-08-05 at 11:42 -0400, planas wrote:
> Hi
> 
> On Fri, 2011-08-05 at 09:35 -0400, Jeff Hubbs wrote: 
> > On 8/5/11 12:47 AM, Sparr wrote:
> > > I've recently come into possession of a large security disintegrator,
> > > designed for shredding things like hard drives and tapes and such. I'm
> > > trying to figure out what to do with it. Selling it is, of course, an
> > > option, but I was thinking of possibly starting up a small security
> > > business to destroy hard drives for people. Is there a market for that
> > > in Atlanta?
> > It would make a big difference if your apparatus of mindless destruction 
> > were mobile.  But you are going to have a waste stream like nobody's 
> > business; some of that will be leaded solder, which is toxic.  One thing 
> > you could certainly do without too much difficulty would be to separate 
> > out the ground-up magnets; run the refuse past a piece of iron that gets 
> > scraped off periodically.  I don't know what all the composition of disk 
> > drive magnets would be in the field - I'd suspect samarium cobalt and 
> > neodymium.  What you recover could potentially be press-formed into 
> > fairly decent magnets, suitable for electricity generation, but as far 
> > as actually separating out the metals into bulk material with a net 
> > positive value, I dunno.
> > 
> > Possessing this device only makes sense if it's actively being used, so, 
> > congratulations on having entered the waste processing business! :)
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> Once you grind up the hard drive you could attempt to recover the
> metals present using a combination of physical and chemical methods.
> The metals should be a reasonable purity to sell .
> 
> If limited metal recovery is done you probably will have D- series
> (unless the EPA has a specific classification) hazardous waste. I do
> not know the current prices for hazardous waste disposal. But when I
> was handling waste disposal I found there was roughly a 10x difference
> between the charges of non-hazardous waste and a hazardous waste.
> 
> Off topic stupidity, most people do not realize that fluorescent
> lights should be disposed as a hazardous waste - mercury is the
> culprit.
> 
> -- 
> Jay Lozier
> jslozier at gmail.com
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