Today I met a new supplier that had the hook up. He has a warehouse where he stores a ton of e waste, he used to do it himself but he says that it's too time consuming with his current business (installing robotics and other electronics for industrials companies) so he would rather just get rid of it in bulk (great for me).
Originally we had agreed on a prearranged deal of 300 HDDs for $280.
I went in knowing nothing about the HDDs other than they were going to be the 3.5" larger ones. I figured I might get lucky on a few and get some old ones that would have high grade non SATA boards.
Well when I got there and saw what he had, I was stunned. Our deal changed and I ended up spending around $320 for so many HDDs and other various deals he threw on top just to get rid of it.
Friends, ALL of his HDD's were high grade IDE older models. I also got a bunch of really interesting things and I will show pictures. Let me know what you guys think, did I get a good deal or did I mess up?
Keep a few things in mind.
-I'm a hobbyist, my time doesn't matter and I'm not paying anyone by the hour to process this.
-the plan is to scrap everything I can't easily sell on ebay, which I think I actually have ALOT of stuff I can simply sell.
-so I'll get clean aluminum ($0.70/lb) and every single board is high grade non SATA, so $20/lb. And let me tell you.. there are SO MANY big fat boards on alot of these HDDs.
-he threw in a bunch of interesting unpopulated boards with gold flashing and gold fingers. These boards are heavy, they feel ceramic and they are brand new. He said they are so heavy because they are made with more copper, like x3 the normal amount(I'm sure one of you guys will be able to tell me what this means)
-I'll sell magnets and platters on ebay in lots, I wasn't aware there was a market for the platters, hobby DIY crafters apparently.
-would love to sell the write heads for gold recovery, so if yall know what my best route is, lmk, but it's not a huge worry for me.

So yea, let me know honestly if this was a win, or a bust.

Not sure if the price was worth it but seems like you got a lot of fun stuff to go through at least.

Instantly recognized the Bigfoot! I've gotten a few but with no way to test I just scrapped them.

I disassemble the hdds I get, run one of the magnets from the drive over the platters to destroy any sensitive data left. Platters, motors and the spacer rings all end up on ebay in bulk after I've collected enough to fill a flat rate box. I haven't tried selling magnets there. The read/write heads contain the tiniest bit of rhodium so I pull those (haven't gotten enough to try and figure out selling just yet).

The blank boards will vary widely and if you plan to send them to Boardsort I would contact Chris directly with photos of them along with what you know so he can tell you if he even wants them. I'm guessing the gfc blanks would be worthwhile to Chris but not sure on the thicker copper ones.

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Here to learn more so I can recycle more
My grades are my own opinion and not an official grade from Boardsort

I think just in resale on the working HDDs I can make my money back. Those bigfoots will sell even untested. I think I will sell these unpopulated boards on ebay to hobbyist for cheap. Look how many I have!

I don't think the photos do it justice. I'm going to make a spreadsheet sheet of everything I got, based on working and not working. Not working will go into full scrap, @$20/lb for IDE boards, well it's alot of material. But I really think resale is going to be my money maker.

After doing some math and test runs, just in PCB weight alone I will at the very least double my money. This does not include all the aluminum, magnets amd other things I can see on my Etsy niche and ebay. Not to mention the original price was actually way different after counting all things up. I got a bunch of random stuff that has some solid resale vintage value with high demand. But thats all just extra. He just wanted to get rid of the e-waste he had and practically tossed in a bunch of free IDE HDDs. Out of all the HDDs I purchased, there are 2 SATA... I have like 400+ IDE HDDs I paid around $340 for, this isn't including all the extra stuff.
But keeping with the original math of $1 per HDD, just by boards alone, not factoring in anything else from the hard drive, I will double the money. I did a few sample batches of 10 and did the math using a good spread of all the different styles off pcbs for the older IDE drives.
This is gonna be so cool seeing what everything equals out to. Im going full need, spread sheet, separate bank account that all fund will go to. Not to be touched until most of the things are scrapped. Ofcourse there are many HDDs that work perfectly. For example I found an HDD that has only sold for $100ish plus on ebay. The one I have is in pristine condition and works.
There's alot of things like this in the "mess" I invested in.

Very nice!

I got into this less for the money and more for trying to help people be responsible with their ewaste. So I don't always have a firm grasp on the monetary value of things. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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Here to learn more so I can recycle more
My grades are my own opinion and not an official grade from Boardsort

I think the last time I saw a Quantum Bigfoot was in the last 90s! It was still working but the bearings were screaming.

Lots of good stuff and scrap in that load! Sell what you can that is working and scrap what doesn't sell.

Sorry for taking so long to get back… combination of holidays being out of the country with family and dealing with issues here in the US all at the same time.

The blank boards look like riser cards.

The StarTech drives are external cases. They plug into the back or side port or a computer or slide into a backplane rack without the bracket adaptor (no extra value) or use a usb or FireWire cable with the bracket (add $5-$15/$10-$25 resp). These look like micro usb.

Bunch of laptop drives and some PCMCIA cards.

Quantum merged with seagate. Conner I remember being in Toshiba NCR, and NEC equipment. They partnered with Toshiba Data for a while, were bought out a few times and eventually merged with seagate as well.
Quantum was known for their 5.25” drives (especially the full height ones, the size of two cd drives stacked), and later in the 90s for Bigfoot. Storing a standard 5.25 space on a 3.5 disk drives with less platters. Quantum did the original research for both PMR perpendicular magnetic storage (which a licensed to Maxell for floppy discs) and SMR shingled magnetic recording that Seagate later rolled out in the 2000s.

The stack is a server unit. In non-technical terms. The individual units plug into a large rack array.

A beautiful GF 7800: feel the power!

“Some random boards” old memory cards.

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You more than made your money if you sell any of that on eBay and even bare scrap you should come out ahead of where you started not counting time.
Working Bigfoot drives that pass a drive Test and make no noise sell very well to those patient.

That GeForce is wicked

Those old external drive cases without the drive, cases will probably fetch 10-20 bucks or so: so you shouldn’t have much of an issue selling those complete.
I would, however scrap the ones that are missing the USB adapter

You got a nice Fetch for a retro computer user

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