I drive an 18 wheeler with a 53 foot drybox. I haul many different products back & forth across the country. Some of those loads are old outdated computers which go to disassembly plants for the precious metals.
When I was young i used to take apart electronic things just to see what was in there. This drove my dad nuts. Something about electronics fascinated me.
I use the magnets for securing small tools and stainless rulers on the wall, as well as plastic measuring triangles (with a small steel washer siliconed to the plastic first). Powering the hard drive plater can be very useful as a miniature sanding disc by glueing wet and dry sandpaper to it for precise grinding or small blade sharpening.
Any hard drives that still function normally can also be sold on eBay with the intention of data recovery specialist using them for parts. Often times many of the specific components are valuable since they're constantly changing. A very detailed listing with plenty of pictures and accurate descriptions of the different numbers on the label can yield some pretty nice sales numbers.
Hi my name's Guillermo from the Dominican Republic,thank you for sharing this information with us, many people and by people, I'm referring to the vast majority, do not know this information thank you again I love recycling and that's very useful information. From the Dominican Republic Guillermo keep it up. I'll follow your videos and share with my friends.
My son gets knackered HDD's from work. I strip them down for the magnets only. They're fiddly to remove from their steel brackets, but I found applying a little heat to the back of the steel, holding it in pliers, then wedging a Stanley blade under the magnet to gently pry them off, without cracking the magnets brittle outer coating. It works around 75% of the time. I cover damaged magnets with some insulating tape and use them to hang metal topped jam jars under shelving.
I only scrap broken hard drives or I use them as props for my house. I would never open a working and good-health hard drive. You seem like a very nice person to be around! I collect vintage hard drives myself as I love vintage technology.
Given that data storage has become mostly solid state or networked, highest and best use for drives under 3TB seems to be empty + scrap. Recently I put a card in a case for 1 TB device backup. The write rate is phenomenal; tco? $50. WD black....
Nowhere did you mention the screws themselves. HDD's are an excellent source of high quality flat top torx bit stainless machine screws of varying size, usually with large heads compared to the thread, very useful for folding knife making and quite difficult to source elsewhere. The screws and the magnets are my primary target when breaking down drives.
Thanks for the great tips! I have scrapped metals for some time now, mostly steel,copper and aluminum. The electronics I saved but didn't know how to process them. Learning how to extract the precious metals is making my junk pile pay off!
Clear and professional; great sound, light and camera work. I would like to have seen how many hours, man-hours, and the stack of 'stuff' it takes to get one ounce of gold. Also, how to melt it and recover it. Thanks for a great start to the process.
I've got about 50 older hard drives that I brought home from a scrap yard I worked at. They weren't licensed to do ecycle so they were quite pleased when I asked if I could have them.
I recently scrapped about 50 hdd. The aluminum value ended up at about 40 bucks. I haven't taken in the stainless yet. Took me about 4 hours. I knew going into it the only value was the alum. I really wanted the magnets though. They are awesome!
Thanx for taking the time to demonstrate and explain what to keep or not to keep. Seems like a nice little project to keep yourself busy and honest in between jobs.
a couple of cents per platter drive (no SSDs). we used to have piles and piles and piles of them. most we spend on chemical to strip the gold was about $500 to accommodate all of them, the pull was $800 (we made $300 on approximately 3000 hard drives) it's not worth it to scrap these things. CRTs are an even worse thing to scrap (and dangerous). it's best to stick to scrapping cars and other large machinery than computers or small electronics.
@@caillousdad5786 wow, thanks for the reply. In my trade I have to scrap dishwashers and ovens (household units) with the high scrap metal price at the moment I’m getting around $20 Aus for each unit, and that’s as bailing steel, not dismantled at all. It’ll make a great Xmas party fund by the end of the year
Very interesting wondering if you can use those parts for anything else. And can you sell those little gold parts and are they worth it. And last can those hard drives can be fix if they stop running let me know
Yes , i am a processor of recovering the metal from electronic stuff , nice video , thankyou ! When i scrap hard drives i burn , crush , pan out the heavys and save the sludge after evapen the panning water , the chips is where the panable gold and pgm's and a lot of silver and lead . I do it as a hobby now ! The gold plate in the sludge is minor compared to chip wire , copper is acid removed and redoxed in a different container. Great informitive video .
I had a flaky hard drive that was making me crazy, it was working, then not working, and more likely to stop working when warm. I finally replaced it and managed to copy all the files to the new drive. When I was about to scrap it, I took off the circuit board and found the contact points on the board that connect to the mechanicals were not plated, or tinned and some were corroded. I found this issue on a 2nd hard drive as well. Once I cleaned the contacts the drive worked fine.
I love your show, exactly what I needed to C. Believe it or not I got my hands on some 1963 circuitry. Would love a show on were asbestos or other nasties could be when we scrap so that we can all be wary and careful. Have had 2 tradie friends die of asbestos related illnesses . Anyway keep your shows coming. 10/10 from me
I have a load of old computers I wanted to scrap cause I am spring cleaning, thank you for this information, I will take some time taking them apart for cash. I want to use the side panels to create some sculptures, any suggestions on how best to do it?
i also collect the - Aluminium case for melting (DIY furnace propane or electric) - the Discs are exelent surface-mirrors good as laser reflectors - the sata connector , good for producing own sata-adapter - and the magnets offcourse - the top cover can be usefull as sheetmetal i didn't know that there is also mumetal and goldwire in it but i think you made an error 5:49 in electronics components labeled with c are capacitors, resistors are labeled as r and usuall are black with a white font on it.
WARNING: You should wear full cover goggles when removing the platters as the older glass ones can shatter very very easily. Alternatively put the drive in a clear bag and reach inside to remove the platters. Destroying the platters for data integrity should be done inside a sealed plastic bag with a combination of a strong magnet and hammer. Believe me, having glass frags removed sucks.
Wow I never knew this, great video I might look into this as I often get computers given to me or find them in storage units I buy, is there an average of a value you get from scrapped hard drive?
Precious metals - I didn't know where they were located so it's good to get a map where to look. Once I have removed the pins is there a way to purify the gold that plates them 'heavily'? Are the caps you showed better sold whole? Is there enough profit (beyond getting great magnets on brackets) in doing 10 to 15 of 1990's hdd's? (Have those in a box, and some old int + ext cd or dvd players; those have led lasers, but any other value?)
There's an "m" somewhere in the middle of neodymium. Like the "r" in the middle of February that well all forget. Those platters make nice windchimes too. Even the little aluminum rings tinkle nicely.
I work at a data center companies move out all the time and leave there older equipment behind and I replace old hard drives I have boxes and boxes of hard drive and old motherboards id like to take to get refined fir top dollar. What are some of the better paying refiners that i could sendor drive me scrap too and i have a pile of over 2000 or 3000 neodym magnets i want to sell too???
how about smelting the whole thing less the magnets ... and then breaking apart the layers? Not sure I understand how it works but notice on "placer gold" that is how we can separate the black sands and the gold without painstaking panning.
Phil Galati Thanks, love that you notice the detail. It takes me a long time to make videos like that. I am working on several atm. Thanks for the great comment. Perfect one to leave off so I can go to sleep.Rob The Plumber
Very informative thank you, I'm in New Zealand, not sure where to sell over here our scrap yards dont buy E waste. I have just stripped about 60 of them, I still have about 30 laptop drives to do. Dummy, I checked google after instead of before
Have a failing hard drive sitting in a junk pile that I haven't thrown out, mainly because I wasn't sure where to send it. However, after getting an idea to smelt some things, I decided to look up how to take apart an HDD and found this video. Thank you!
I have a couple of old boards and hard drives lying around that I will be stripping for a project. I've noticed along with the little rectangular structure marked with a C there are multiple other ones marked with different letters. My question is are those other letter ones the same thing as the ones marked with a C?
Yes, those are monolithic ceramic capacitors. The ones marked with Cxxx are usually keepers. Once you strip them take a magnet and see if they are magnetic. If they are not, they are worth refining!
Hello, Very interesting video about hard drives, I would have a question .. if possible .. how many hard drives do I need to collect a gram of gold .. Thank you
I found that disks and the spacer rings and the casing of some HDD is magnesium and not aluminum. Magnesium dust from filings will sparkle in a flame and white vinegar makes bubbles on Mg not on Al. Now is it worth knowing ?
I think it is a magnesium alloy of Al and or Li. This gives it much better fatigue and creep properties than aluminium alloys would have. I always thought the spacer rings were a bit too light to be Al, also they chime with a much too high pitch for aluminium.
the MAGGNETS are good for testing silver bars and rounds....as the silver slides across the magnet it slows down because of the diamagnetic effect...it builds up magnetic resistance due to a building of a magnetic field in the silver....
the video picture sais the arm has pure gold? like 24 k? not gold plated right? i like the Idea of Gold recovery from electronics but it seems like to much chemistry and use of dangerous chemicals to retrieve all that gold leaf. then for some reason after treating and smelting the gold it seems it doesnt go for very much. i like to gold pan for placer gold. was also curious about the ceramic pieces that contain silver and palladium, do you have to chemically separate that too or can you just smelt the ceramic off with borax? if so it would leave you with a silver palladium mix then you would have to try to separate those two or sell it as is lol
cool, I like recycling any electronics if possible. I have for most my life built many prototype projects using parts from old boards from various household products. I never throw anything Electonic or Electrical out without dismantling it first. If not just to see how it was constructed. But as you know lots of goodies in all that stuff. I used to use the hard drive disc as a chime because they have a nice ring if you suspend them right and tap them with something. But some tend to corrode eventually, could be because I live near the beach as well.
Pretty good info on some components, but bad idea on burning or torching rare earth metals to recover gold, etc. These are properly recovered by removing the component parts to the smallest value by content and type, crushing them and chemically dissolving the metals in special acids. Properly recovering gold, silver, cobalt, palladium is very specialized, requiring expert handling of dangerous and caustic substances, and some pure refined metal or mineral components are very hazardous to the touch in pure form. I know because this is my background as a chemical engineer with loads of specialized testing and recovery of lab specimens, and recover semiconductors as a hobby business.
The U.S. Military finds using citric acids from fruit useful in chemically separating the precious metals from resin and plastics of components, while eliminating the use of caustic chemicals or burning.
@@urzaplainswalker10 holy crap..i got a half lemon half grapefruit hybrid that's produces awful fruit...its good antifungal and now i know what else to use it for as its quite a producer. ...tks
Very interesting.... big thumbs up. Where do you source all your hard drives.... are they easy to find or do you need to go hunting? Also do you have a forge where you melt all this stuff down. If so have you done any videos on this process? Thanks....
I have a recycling company.... I throw away thousands of HDD's and other components right into the tin pile every year... didn't know they contained so much cool stuff. I'll have to start boxing them up and take some time to get them apart. The earth magnets are a super bonus for a guy who's into recycling too lol Thanks!
Tin price is... 205.00 a ton. So that's about 0.20 cents a pound. (Canadian) Crazy how much aluminum is in there. And it's weird those magnets are inside, I was literally looking up the earth magnets on eBay about two days prior... they are worth some bucks. Shame you're not in BC, I'd invite you to my shop to grab some cool stuff. If only I could figure out the chemical process (or have time for it I guess) for all of my ram and computer boards etc I get... I save crap loads of that stuff for eBay! Basically my shop is a disneyland for grown ups! (Hence the reason I'm giving away silver in one of my videos... and more cool stuff to come!) I'll subscribe to you... do the same? Cheers!
Is there enough precious metals in a hard drive to allow me to upgrade my Overseer's Guardian and attain a long barrel, recoil compensated stock, .308 receiver & a suppressor?
Very informative video, however, I used to work at a metal recycling yard, and just want to make a correction. At the end of your video, where it said the front plate is stainless steel and not being very valuable. Stainless steal is worth more, pound for pound than aluminum... generally $0.40-0.60 per pound.
Yep you are right. Although I also said in the video that I use the alum to make parts. I do keep a bin for stainless and it all adds up. SS is not something I focus on. If it is not worth at least $2 a pound I really do not care about it. Thanks for watching.
What i think is i found that you discribed more than most vids do. To scrap anything one must know what to scrap that is valuable. Im still learning and im egar for more detailed info on these boards. I would like to know what each component has of value and what type of metals they contain. The IC chips. Would pulverizing them be a way to expose the metals? Ill keep watching for your vids. Thanks for the info
Quick Question Rob.. I did a break down of a scrap hard drive myself. When i removed the read write actuator and took a closer look with a loop i noticed that it had very small Green and red wires going from the end all the way down to the base. Is this gold colored somehow or is this another metal replacing the gold?? thanks in advance.. the wires were bare for about a cm then were insulated the rest of the way.
What an excellent and also finely produced, albeit straight to point matter of fact video footage you've put together in this compilation good sir !! I very much appreciate your fine details, specifically speaking to what materials are in which components, equally so true for precious metals !! That's EXACTLY what I was hoping to learn from viewing your video and you absolutely delivered !! Thanks again for sharing my friend !
that hard drive motor is fine to play with you can spin it using a microcontroller and a driver :) you can make a nice little grinder for example it is not very strong but it can do quite a lot of rpm
Nice one. I got about 20 of old HDD's all 10GB to 80GB old IDE 3.5" drives; found yesterday they contain neodymium magnets that I plan to take out and change into a metal detector. After watching your vid I will be keeping the more valuable elements too. Cheers. A vid I watched said there is a 3rd smaller Nd magnet behind where drive actuator sits to hold it in place when off and in transport. Smart vid, learned some cool stuff in 7 minutes. Cheers Rob.
What is so valuable about the magnets? And wouldnt it take a lot of those little square things marked with a C# to actually have any value to make it worthwhile to strip them off?
If I had a continuous supply of these I would go for the gold just to say I have some. I could find more in a rocky mountain stream in one day, though. What I really want to know is how to make the motor work with the components already in the hard drive. Where do I hook up wires to get the thing to work without having to buy an esc off hobbyking? These are fairly powerful for their size and could be used for simple tools or RC devices. The magnets make great wall hooks if you have steel walls like in a ware house or a big fridge. They are also good for attaching things to old heavy cast iron machinery like my old Jointer or bandsaw table for extending the table or holding a square or even a can on the side with water for grinding and cooling or mineral spirits for putting rusty tools in so they can shake while a machine is running.
Have you tried electric withe caustic to get gold off I found gold comes off fast when mucking about with hydrogen generator then pump through filter with magnet sluice magnet attracts gold
I have taken apart 14 external hard drives. My dad used them for backing up his various computers. I am not interested in harvesting the metals. What is the best way to sell these parts?
You cannot replace the head. You cannot replace the disks. You cannot replace the motor (usually). You can only swap control boards, and even then, they have to *EXACTLY* match and you better be prepared to pray to whatever god(s) you may, as you'll probably lose all data. The positioning of everything is entirely dependent on initial location. Even removing the disks.. when you reseat the screws, it's out of alignment and there goes your porn collection. Buy a new drive.
Thanks so much! I normally don't deal w/ hard drives. But I found a bunch of 486' & Tandy's on side of road ( It was a good day). So I'm down to HD"s and M boards.( I usually buy scrap from local repair shop RAM CPU ect). I find slicing ribbon cables containing gold into fine cross section pieces (acid eats from both sides in hot aqua regia solution) easier than incineration. The temps have to be monitored too closely for the average scrapper. Metals are way too thin. end up w/ plastic B-B.
This was pretty neat to watch. It does pain me though when older hard drives are scrapped, such as those with the SCSI interface. They're getting rare these days!
sorry to be off topic but does any of you know of a way to get back into an Instagram account?? I somehow lost the login password. I would love any tips you can offer me
I get to collect the old recivers fro fiberoptic cable a lot of them are tvos I have been piling these up just recently I've been taking apart I have about 100 hard drives looks like I'm going for it lol I been collecting those magnets I got almost a five gallon bucket full of them every screw in the garage is stuck to the bucket lol
I'm watching your 7yr old video's because there's nothing better on YT about tear'downs,scrapping etc. Excellent visuals and content! Thank you!
I drive an 18 wheeler with a 53 foot drybox. I haul many different products back & forth across the country. Some of those loads are old outdated computers which go to disassembly plants for the precious metals.
U should bring em to me and I'll take em all apart then we go to the scrapyard and split the cash lol
When I was young i used to take apart electronic things just to see what was in there. This drove my dad nuts. Something about electronics fascinated me.
I did the same thing and then joined the air Force doing repairs on microwave and satalite communications equipment . Boring ass job
I did that to and my dad would get a pissed at me also because I would never put whatever it was back together lol
I use the magnets for securing small tools and stainless rulers on the wall, as well as plastic measuring triangles (with a small steel washer siliconed to the plastic first). Powering the hard drive plater can be very useful as a miniature sanding disc by glueing wet and dry sandpaper to it for precise grinding or small blade sharpening.
How do you power the motor ?
Any hard drives that still function normally can also be sold on eBay with the intention of data recovery specialist using them for parts. Often times many of the specific components are valuable since they're constantly changing. A very detailed listing with plenty of pictures and accurate descriptions of the different numbers on the label can yield some pretty nice sales numbers.
Interesting. This apply to older models (1st half of the 90's?) Mainly Seagate + Maxtor, some working early SATA 1 IBMs
Probably
@@iggy151❤ this
Hi my name's Guillermo from the Dominican Republic,thank you for sharing this information with us, many people and by people, I'm referring to the vast majority, do not know this information thank you again I love recycling and that's very useful information. From the Dominican Republic Guillermo keep it up. I'll follow your videos and share with my friends.
Wow! Been scrappin' for more than 50 years and always learning something new! Thanks!
My son gets knackered HDD's from work. I strip them down for the magnets only. They're fiddly to remove from their steel brackets, but I found applying a little heat to the back of the steel, holding it in pliers, then wedging a Stanley blade under the magnet to gently pry them off, without cracking the magnets brittle outer coating. It works around 75% of the time. I cover damaged magnets with some insulating tape and use them to hang metal topped jam jars under shelving.
Thanks for the tip! :)
I only scrap broken hard drives or I use them as props for my house. I would never open a working and good-health hard drive. You seem like a very nice person to be around! I collect vintage hard drives myself as I love vintage technology.
Given that data storage has become mostly solid state or networked, highest and best use for drives under 3TB seems to be empty + scrap. Recently I put a card in a case for 1 TB device backup. The write rate is phenomenal; tco? $50. WD black....
Nowhere did you mention the screws themselves. HDD's are an excellent source of high quality flat top torx bit stainless machine screws of varying size, usually with large heads compared to the thread, very useful for folding knife making and quite difficult to source elsewhere. The screws and the magnets are my primary target when breaking down drives.
Folding knife making?
Thank you, its so hard to know what is worth keeping and what isent. I wish you would make more of these videos for commonly scrapped items.
Thanks for the great tips! I have scrapped metals for some time now, mostly steel,copper and aluminum. The electronics I saved but didn't know how to process them. Learning how to extract the precious metals is making my junk pile pay off!
CRAIG HANSEN No problem! Thanks for watching and commenting. I hope you have subscribed!
Thank you for breaking everything down in simple terms foe everyone.
I found the video amazing.
Clear and professional; great sound, light and camera work. I would like to have seen how many hours, man-hours, and the stack of 'stuff' it takes to get one ounce of gold. Also, how to melt it and recover it. Thanks for a great start to the process.
Patrick Phillips
A lot 😂 honestly I make enough just scrapping boards and selling the components to refiners by the kg.
I’m a mechanic not a chemist 😉
Lexicon Devil do you happen to have some info material on the process? I'd greatly appreciate any info.
I've got about 50 older hard drives that I brought home from a scrap yard I worked at. They weren't licensed to do ecycle so they were quite pleased when I asked if I could have them.
I recently scrapped about 50 hdd. The aluminum value ended up at about 40 bucks. I haven't taken in the stainless yet. Took me about 4 hours. I knew going into it the only value was the alum. I really wanted the magnets though. They are awesome!
At last someone who knows what metals are worth bothering with, and what to discard. Good video .Keep em coming.
The neodymium magnets are good
I've watched many hard-drive Scrapping videos and this is one of the best!!
Have a Great Day!!!
Thanx for taking the time to demonstrate and explain what to keep or not to keep. Seems like a nice little project to keep yourself busy and honest in between jobs.
Indeed good video, How many amps/watts/volts does it take to run the motor?
i could listen to you all day. well presented.
Great video, thanks. Just wondering how much would you get $$ on average for a disassembled hard drive, ?
a couple of cents per platter drive (no SSDs). we used to have piles and piles and piles of them. most we spend on chemical to strip the gold was about $500 to accommodate all of them, the pull was $800 (we made $300 on approximately 3000 hard drives) it's not worth it to scrap these things. CRTs are an even worse thing to scrap (and dangerous). it's best to stick to scrapping cars and other large machinery than computers or small electronics.
@@caillousdad5786 wow, thanks for the reply. In my trade I have to scrap dishwashers and ovens (household units) with the high scrap metal price at the moment I’m getting around $20 Aus for each unit, and that’s as bailing steel, not dismantled at all. It’ll make a great Xmas party fund by the end of the year
Excellent, highly detailed and captioned video. Best of it's kind that I've come across.
chicks with dicks
Very nice video. As a scrapper I find these videos very usefull tools to help me in my daily tear downs. Keep up the great work. :)
I am glad you enjoyed it. Thanks for watching.
Very interesting wondering if you can use those parts for anything else. And can you sell those little gold parts and are they worth it. And last can those hard drives can be fix if they stop running let me know
Yes , i am a processor of recovering the metal from electronic stuff , nice video , thankyou ! When i scrap hard drives i burn , crush , pan out the heavys and save the sludge after evapen the panning water , the chips is where the panable gold and pgm's and a lot of silver and lead . I do it as a hobby now ! The gold plate in the sludge is minor compared to chip wire , copper is acid removed and redoxed in a different container. Great informitive video .
I had a flaky hard drive that was making me crazy, it was working, then not working, and more likely to stop working when warm.
I finally replaced it and managed to copy all the files to the new drive. When I was about to scrap it, I took off the circuit board and found the contact points on the board that connect to the mechanicals were not plated, or tinned and some were corroded.
I found this issue on a 2nd hard drive as well. Once I cleaned the contacts the drive worked fine.
Is it worth your time to do this? Or would a second job pay as well?
Wondering about reclaiming the amplifier chip that the ferrite heads feed to .. Surely that can be useful to make a sensitive detector ?
Love the video. But how do you get gold off of the gold plated fittings.
Those machiones aluminum parts in the very beginning of the video are perfect to go on Les Paul and Epiphone Guitars around the switch.
What do you need recover gold or other precious metals..just asking please share👍
Is there anything you can think of making with the/many aluminum harddrive frame/enclosures???
I love your show, exactly what I needed to C. Believe it or not I got my hands on some 1963 circuitry. Would love a show on were asbestos or other nasties could be when we scrap so that we can all be wary and careful. Have had 2 tradie friends die of asbestos related illnesses . Anyway keep your shows coming. 10/10 from me
I have a load of old computers I wanted to scrap cause I am spring cleaning, thank you for this information, I will take some time taking them apart for cash. I want to use the side panels to create some sculptures, any suggestions on how best to do it?
i also collect the
- Aluminium case for melting (DIY furnace propane or electric)
- the Discs are exelent surface-mirrors good as laser reflectors
- the sata connector , good for producing own sata-adapter
- and the magnets offcourse
- the top cover can be usefull as sheetmetal
i didn't know that there is also mumetal and goldwire in it
but i think you made an error 5:49 in electronics components labeled with c are capacitors, resistors are labeled as r and usuall are black with a white font on it.
Very educational. I learned that I will leave the scrapping of computer components to others! Thank-you!
WARNING: You should wear full cover goggles when removing the platters as the older glass ones can shatter very very easily. Alternatively put the drive in a clear bag and reach inside to remove the platters. Destroying the platters for data integrity should be done inside a sealed plastic bag with a combination of a strong magnet and hammer. Believe me, having glass frags removed sucks.
Wow I never knew this, great video I might look into this as I often get computers given to me or find them in storage units I buy, is there an average of a value you get from scrapped hard drive?
Can you use the hard drive discs as anodes or cathodes in electrolytic reactions?
Precious metals - I didn't know where they were located so it's good to get a map where to look. Once I have removed the pins is there a way to purify the gold that plates them 'heavily'? Are the caps you showed better sold whole? Is there enough profit (beyond getting great magnets on brackets) in doing 10 to 15 of 1990's hdd's? (Have those in a box, and some old int + ext cd or dvd players; those have led lasers, but any other value?)
Nice grow light! How much do you sell the trees for?
There's an "m" somewhere in the middle of neodymium. Like the "r" in the middle of February that well all forget. Those platters make nice windchimes too. Even the little aluminum rings tinkle nicely.
I work at a data center companies move out all the time and leave there older equipment behind and I replace old hard drives I have boxes and boxes of hard drive and old motherboards id like to take to get refined fir top dollar. What are some of the better paying refiners that i could sendor drive me scrap too and i have a pile of over 2000 or 3000 neodym magnets i want to sell too???
Phillip Brewster do u still have a bunch of hard drives?
Email me Jaevans78@aol.com
how about smelting the whole thing less the magnets ... and then breaking apart the layers? Not sure I understand how it works but notice on "placer gold" that is how we can separate the black sands and the gold without painstaking panning.
How much gold are you gonna get out of one of these, and how much does it cost to get it?
I liked your video very much. the quality was excellent. I very much liked the macro close up shots. your explanation was also right on. Thanks
Phil Galati Thanks, love that you notice the detail. It takes me a long time to make videos like that. I am working on several atm. Thanks for the great comment. Perfect one to leave off so I can go to sleep.Rob The Plumber
Very informative thank you, I'm in New Zealand, not sure where to sell over here our scrap yards dont buy E waste. I have just stripped about 60 of them, I still have about 30 laptop drives to do. Dummy, I checked google after instead of before
Look for a refinery mate thats how I cracked it in the UK as you say scrap yard don't know or won't pay top money😊
Have a failing hard drive sitting in a junk pile that I haven't thrown out, mainly because I wasn't sure where to send it. However, after getting an idea to smelt some things, I decided to look up how to take apart an HDD and found this video. Thank you!
I have a couple of old boards and hard drives lying around that I will be stripping for a project. I've noticed along with the little rectangular structure marked with a C there are multiple other ones marked with different letters. My question is are those other letter ones the same thing as the ones marked with a C?
Yes, those are monolithic ceramic capacitors. The ones marked with Cxxx are usually keepers. Once you strip them take a magnet and see if they are magnetic. If they are not, they are worth refining!
Is that Pure gold on the actuator tip or plated.
You could use the palladium in an electroplating process. Or can't you?
Hello, Very interesting video about hard drives, I would have a question .. if possible .. how many hard drives do I need to collect a gram of gold .. Thank you
I found a new, vintage scsi drive it weights like 4lb maybe more. Would it be worth to sell whole or scrap
So inside the needle part that goes on the plate is that pure gold or plated
I found that disks and the spacer rings and the casing of some HDD is magnesium and not aluminum. Magnesium dust from filings will sparkle in a flame and white vinegar makes bubbles on Mg not on Al. Now is it worth knowing ?
I think it is a magnesium alloy of Al and or Li. This gives it much better fatigue and creep properties than aluminium alloys would have. I always thought the spacer rings were a bit too light to be Al, also they chime with a much too high pitch for aluminium.
the MAGGNETS are good for testing silver bars and rounds....as the silver slides across the magnet it slows down because of the diamagnetic effect...it builds up magnetic resistance due to a building of a magnetic field in the silver....
the video picture sais the arm has pure gold? like 24 k? not gold plated right? i like the Idea of Gold recovery from electronics but it seems like to much chemistry and use of dangerous chemicals to retrieve all that gold leaf. then for some reason after treating and smelting the gold it seems it doesnt go for very much. i like to gold pan for placer gold. was also curious about the ceramic pieces that contain silver and palladium, do you have to chemically separate that too or can you just smelt the ceramic off with borax? if so it would leave you with a silver palladium mix then you would have to try to separate those two or sell it as is lol
good video do you know scrap value of gold silver etc in the drive in dollars ?
cool, I like recycling any electronics if possible. I have for most my life built many prototype projects using parts from old boards from various household products. I never throw anything Electonic or Electrical out without dismantling it first. If not just to see how it was constructed. But as you know lots of goodies in all that stuff. I used to use the hard drive disc as a chime because they have a nice ring if you suspend them right and tap them with something. But some tend to corrode eventually, could be because I live near the beach as well.
Pretty good info on some components, but bad idea on burning or torching rare earth metals to recover gold, etc. These are properly recovered by removing the component parts to the smallest value by content and type, crushing them and chemically dissolving the metals in special acids. Properly recovering gold, silver, cobalt, palladium is very specialized, requiring expert handling of dangerous and caustic substances, and some pure refined metal or mineral components are very hazardous to the touch in pure form. I know because this is my background as a chemical engineer with loads of specialized testing and recovery of lab specimens, and recover semiconductors as a hobby business.
R.V. Gad
My self
Pooraram
A theoretical physicts
The U.S. Military finds using citric acids from fruit useful in chemically separating the precious metals from resin and plastics of components, while eliminating the use of caustic chemicals or burning.
Please prove this is a functional method with a vid
I would like to know if tantalum capacitors are worth more intact, or, is that not an issue? What is the current value?
@@urzaplainswalker10 holy crap..i got a half lemon half grapefruit hybrid that's produces awful fruit...its good antifungal and now i know what else to use it for as its quite a producer. ...tks
wonderfully done video with no frills... thanks
I like the close ups those help a lot . Learning of the parts what they do. Very cool
Very interesting.... big thumbs up. Where do you source all your hard drives.... are they easy to find or do you need to go hunting? Also do you have a forge where you melt all this stuff down. If so have you done any videos on this process? Thanks....
I've learned a few things about metals in use for hard drives, thanks.
how well do the froged housings melt down will they make good castings
I have a recycling company.... I throw away thousands of HDD's and other components right into the tin pile every year... didn't know they contained so much cool stuff. I'll have to start boxing them up and take some time to get them apart.
The earth magnets are a super bonus for a guy who's into recycling too lol
Thanks!
Ill pay you 2x tin price for them :O Thanks for watching.
Tin price is... 205.00 a ton. So that's about 0.20 cents a pound. (Canadian)
Crazy how much aluminum is in there. And it's weird those magnets are inside, I was literally looking up the earth magnets on eBay about two days prior... they are worth some bucks.
Shame you're not in BC, I'd invite you to my shop to grab some cool stuff. If only I could figure out the chemical process (or have time for it I guess) for all of my ram and computer boards etc I get... I save crap loads of that stuff for eBay!
Basically my shop is a disneyland for grown ups! (Hence the reason I'm giving away silver in one of my videos... and more cool stuff to come!)
I'll subscribe to you... do the same?
Cheers!
TimHortonsAddict Are you on the island or mainland?
Is there enough precious metals in a hard drive to allow me to upgrade my Overseer's Guardian and attain a long barrel, recoil compensated stock, .308 receiver & a suppressor?
no but you can build a klingon disruptor with it
Very informative video, however, I used to work at a metal recycling yard, and just want to make a correction. At the end of your video, where it said the front plate is stainless steel and not being very valuable. Stainless steal is worth more, pound for pound than aluminum... generally $0.40-0.60 per pound.
Yep you are right. Although I also said in the video that I use the alum to make parts. I do keep a bin for stainless and it all adds up. SS is not something I focus on. If it is not worth at least $2 a pound I really do not care about it. Thanks for watching.
Rob The Plumber a penny saved is a penny earned.
What i think is i found that you discribed more than most vids do. To scrap anything one must know what to scrap that is valuable. Im still learning and im egar for more detailed info on these boards. I would like to know what each component has of value
and what type of metals they contain. The IC chips. Would pulverizing them be a way to expose the metals? Ill keep watching for your vids. Thanks for the info
You said the magnet and brackets are valuable and can be sold on eBay. What makes them valuable? Whado people do with them? Thank you
Hi Rob the little boxes that are black and have numbers on them are thay the same as the biger ones and what is with the ones thay are not magnetic
Many of the drives I have dismantled have a 9 carat gold ground screw on the flex board connections.
I love the attention to detail of the photos. I understand better what I've thrown away before. it won't happen again. Thank you
thelousysloth Your welcome. Thanks for watching.
Quick Question Rob.. I did a break down of a scrap hard drive myself. When i removed the read write actuator and took a closer look with a loop i noticed that it had very small Green and red wires going from the end all the way down to the base. Is this gold colored somehow or is this another metal replacing the gold?? thanks in advance.. the wires were bare for about a cm then were insulated the rest of the way.
It is gold, about 2 microns thick.
What an excellent and also finely produced, albeit straight to point matter of fact video footage you've put together in this compilation good sir !! I very much appreciate your fine details, specifically speaking to what materials are in which components, equally so true for precious metals !! That's EXACTLY what I was hoping to learn from viewing your video and you absolutely delivered !! Thanks again for sharing my friend !
Hi could you put a list of the computers that have this materials ?
that hard drive motor is fine to play with you can spin it using a microcontroller and a driver :) you can make a nice little grinder for example it is not very strong but it can do quite a lot of rpm
I took apart a hard drive but yours didn't have what I found idk if it's gold or brass? Could you help me out please?
Are the conductors on the tip of the reader pure solid gold or just plated?
The older drives I have found gold. Not much though. It all adds up in the end.
The contact pins are either copper or brass. Who you tryin to pull the scam on ?
Nice one. I got about 20 of old HDD's all 10GB to 80GB old IDE 3.5" drives; found yesterday they contain neodymium magnets that I plan to take out and change into a metal detector. After watching your vid I will be keeping the more valuable elements too. Cheers. A vid I watched said there is a 3rd smaller Nd magnet behind where drive actuator sits to hold it in place when off and in transport. Smart vid, learned some cool stuff in 7 minutes. Cheers Rob.
So much culmination of technology and inventions that can be had for just $40.
Good job, this video makes it a bit more hands on for the novice- thanks Rob.
ballparkfrankplus1 Thanks for watching.
I got a gold color coil instead of a copper color? Does that mean it's gold or no?
What is so valuable about the magnets? And wouldnt it take a lot of those little square things marked with a C# to actually have any value to make it worthwhile to strip them off?
If I had a continuous supply of these I would go for the gold just to say I have some. I could find more in a rocky mountain stream in one day, though. What I really want to know is how to make the motor work with the components already in the hard drive. Where do I hook up wires to get the thing to work without having to buy an esc off hobbyking? These are fairly powerful for their size and could be used for simple tools or RC devices.
The magnets make great wall hooks if you have steel walls like in a ware house or a big fridge. They are also good for attaching things to old heavy cast iron machinery like my old Jointer or bandsaw table for extending the table or holding a square or even a can on the side with water for grinding and cooling or mineral spirits for putting rusty tools in so they can shake while a machine is running.
Have you tried electric withe caustic to get gold off I found gold comes off fast when mucking about with hydrogen generator then pump through filter with magnet sluice magnet attracts gold
I have taken apart 14 external hard drives. My dad used them for backing up his various computers. I am not interested in harvesting the metals. What is the best way to sell these parts?
Crack ed vibes
what kind of camera did you use for macro shot it was great
I use a Canon EOS 60D with a Tamaron 90 macro lens. Thanks for watching.
please help me
What data must be compatible with among WD hard drives 2.5 BLUE If I want to replaced Head reading or pallets
Thanks..
You cannot replace the head. You cannot replace the disks. You cannot replace the motor (usually). You can only swap control boards, and even then, they have to *EXACTLY* match and you better be prepared to pray to whatever god(s) you may, as you'll probably lose all data. The positioning of everything is entirely dependent on initial location. Even removing the disks.. when you reseat the screws, it's out of alignment and there goes your porn collection. Buy a new drive.
You showed me something interested, thank you for sharing this video.
Rodney Jackson
I could show you something quite interesting regarding gold!!!!
@@FlourgoldWizards Hi
Great video. Great job explaining various parts and where the value is. Thanks .
Thanks so much!
I normally don't deal w/ hard drives. But I found a bunch of 486' & Tandy's on side of road ( It was a good day). So I'm down to HD"s and M boards.( I usually buy scrap from local repair shop RAM CPU ect).
I find slicing ribbon cables containing gold into fine cross section pieces (acid eats from both sides in hot aqua regia solution) easier than incineration. The temps have to be monitored too closely for the average scrapper. Metals are way too thin. end up w/ plastic B-B.
Great find and thanks for the info on the ribbon cables.
This was pretty neat to watch. It does pain me though when older hard drives are scrapped, such as those with the SCSI interface. They're getting rare these days!
What's good about them droolerdork? I'm interested
@@disgusted4708 they're good for vintage computers
Nice..email me enquiries@electricycle.info
@@disgusted4708 sent you an email
This guy is pretty informative. I can really appreciate that.
sorry to be off topic but does any of you know of a way to get back into an Instagram account??
I somehow lost the login password. I would love any tips you can offer me
@Yusuf Aaron instablaster =)
Hi,your descriptions were exellent.i like your voice and you are great.Am Iranian but i like you man.Thanks
Nice way to present a video mate, informative and to the point, thank you
Rob, What do you do with the shiny discs that you get out of the hard drive since they aren't worth processing to get the palladium?
I get to collect the old recivers fro fiberoptic cable a lot of them are tvos I have been piling these up just recently I've been taking apart I have about 100 hard drives looks like I'm going for it lol I been collecting those magnets I got almost a five gallon bucket full of them every screw in the garage is stuck to the bucket lol
So nice information... How is it possible to get gold from this hard drive?