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I seem to have an ever growing collection of old USB drives of varying sizes. All were state of the art when bought, bit now seem tiny e.g. 250 Gb. I'm just upgrading my main store to multiple 5 Gb drives, freeing up 2 Tb ones which are out of space...
What do you do with them all?
Ebay / bin / donate to local school?
Throw them under a hedge.
.. -after filling them with grumble, making 21st century version of hedge porn, slowoldman?
Given you don’t physically ruin your drive, you have about 1,500 connections and about 10,000 write cycles before you can expect the USB life cycle to become questionable
Given the amount of data lost by students who rely on usb drives are there sole store of their work (in a day we all have access to free cloud storage), I'd not suggest school. Also new drives cost so little really, maybe donate them to a charidy shop?
I'll have the 250gb ones!!
If you give them to anybody make sure all your old data is well obliterated.
Give them to relatives as an alternative to a christmas card, put on your annual family photos etc.
Or you could build a blackberry pi fileserver cluster with them.
.. -after filling them with grumble, making 21st century version of hedge porn, slowoldman?
I was assuming they probably already were full of grumble. No-one leaves that stuff on the hard drive do they?
Genuinely confused about what you're talking about. The numbers don't make sense.
However, old drives get binned. A little more careful with c: drives as they may have sensitive data but a drive with music or films etc just gets put in the bin. I took one apart once and was disappointed by the insides. I was expecting something much more interesting. Magnets were fun for 5 minutes.
If you're talking about little USB flash drives, I keep anything over 1Gb. They seem to get used and sometimes it's handy to give someone files on a flash drive and not care if it doesn't come back.
If they are truly too small to keep, write random garbage to them a few times, then break them as best you can and take them to recycling.
[i]dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/<insert USB drive name here>[/i] should do the trick.
I will never, ever understand how a tiny microchip is capable of storing music and pictures. I know it's digital but that's as far as my knowledge goes.
It's basically like writing very, very small and having something that can read it aloud to you.
Think of it as a library looked after by pixies. The better the pixie, the smaller you can make the writing, the more you can store and the faster they can read it to you.
Genuinely confused about what you're talking about. The numbers don't make sense.
You're thinking pen drives. I mean external USB Hard drives. Must have a dozen scattered about the place....
5Tb replacements just arrived from Amazon this am....
slowoldman - Member
Throw them under a hedge.
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The better the pixie, the smaller you can make the writing, the more you can store and the faster they can read it to you
Ah so more pixies is better?
FFS don't smash them up, just run a decent wiping program such as [url= https://sourceforge.net/projects/dban/ ]DBAN[/url] and sell it or give the to someone who will use them.
Just disconnect any used drives first!
I will never, ever understand how a tiny microchip is capable of storing music and pictures. I know it's digital but that's as far as my knowledge goes.
Well..
[url= http://www.explainthatstuff.com/flashmemory.html ]Flash memory essentially uses one transistor to store each bit[/url] (a one or zero).
Transistors looked like this in the 1950s:
[img] 
?478[/img]
But we got better at making them. And better at making them small.
So these days we can produce chips a couple of centimeters across that are have [url= https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count ]15 billion transistors on them[/url]!