Hard drive recycling?

February 13, 2023 12:04 PM

Can these two dozen failed 3.5" internal hard disks be recycled?

I run a large data array for a scientific lab, and we generate about one failed Seagate Exos (various models) hard disk per month. It kills me to throw them away, so I've been storing them. I've got around two dozen by now. Is there anyone out there who will take them and reuse/recycle them rather than throw them in a landfill?

I can't seem to find any indication Seagate will take them back, and I haven't found any obvious other solution. Thanks!

posted by Salvor Hardin to Technology (10 answers total)

I too would love an answer to this problem! Can you clarify how they are failing? If you are just seeing a few bad sectors you could probably keep using them in a new setup that is more able to risk a disk error than you can, but that’s a pretty vague solution.
posted by Going To Maine at 12:17 PM on February 13, 2023

Best Buy takes hard drives as part of their e-waste recycling program. I would try drilling a hole through each one to render it unrecoverable before dropping them off. Also, take a look at your city's recycling program; there are usually municipal programs for this kind of stuff.
posted by backseatpilot at 12:23 PM on February 13, 2023 [3 favorites]

I would take the magnets out. They're super strong! Unless hard drives have changed on the last decade.
posted by alexei at 12:27 PM on February 13, 2023

If there is any chance of sensitive data being on them, you should drill them or run them through a powerful enough degausser that the heads are destroyed (assuming you're talking about a magnetic disk).

In general, unless Seagate has a recycling program, I'd destroy and then generically recycle them. A defective hard drive can never really be trusted again. And they don't tend to have a lot of rare elements that make them worth dissembling so my gut feeling is that an awful lot don't get recycled in an efficient or ethical way.
posted by Candleman at 1:02 PM on February 13, 2023

I also came here to say to open the cases and take the magnets out. They make great fridge magnets. It's kind of a pain to do even with an ifixit or similar toolkit so expect to thoroughly break stuff while doing this, and a smarter-than-average bear would wear glasses to protect against the odd flying shard.

Once it's in bits, you can take the circuit board out for landfill or general electronics recycling and (AFAIK) put the case and platters in your metal recycling. If you're worried about nation-state-level attempts to get your data, fuck up the platters real good before you do so.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 1:05 PM on February 13, 2023

look in your area for electronics recyclers. Green Century here in Portland handles our e-waste, including hard disks. They will for an additional fee also destroy data and provide a certificate to that effect.
posted by Dr. Twist at 1:24 PM on February 13, 2023

Best answer: What devices are eligible for trade-in with the Seagate Product Take Back Program?
All Seagate, Maxtor, and LaCie branded hard drives including out of warranty disk drives are eligible to participate in the program. At this moment, SSDs are excluded.
posted by Lanark at 3:08 PM on February 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

Once upon a time I had to RMA a batch of 120 Seagate Exos x14's (or maybe x12's) after I had 30+ that failed from the group. They sent me eight boxes of x16's as a replacement and those are still working to this day.

If you have a stack of them and they are within the warranty period, you should be able to swap them for new ones. At that point it is up to Seagate to push them into their recycling program noted by Lanark above.
posted by SegFaultCoreDump at 3:19 PM on February 13, 2023

If you're buying these via a university or state government purchase order / term contract it is worth it to contact your Seagate representative to ask what can be done about it, and also to see if their engineers can help discover the reason for the failures. It is possibly worth it to them - with the increasingly large amounts of data used in the sciences these days, they have great opportunities for sales IF their drives don't get a reputation for a short MTBF (mean time between failure for you non-IT folk)
posted by TimHare at 9:17 PM on February 13, 2023

Best answer: Western Digital has a recycling program that I've used on multiple occasions. You can mail them the drives – they provide a label for free shipping. To my knowledge they don't limit this to WD drives, and I've mailed Seagate and Hitachi drives to them in the past. They'll even give you a 15% off coupon for purchases in the WD online store (which I've never used). https://www.westerndigital.com/company/programs/easy-recycle
posted by StrawberryPie at 2:44 PM on February 14, 2023