Does anyone else harvest the magnets and platters from old drives as a monument to selfhosting history?

I use the platters like this as my primary long term storage solution. It just saves so much space without the large enclosures. /s

Techno-shamanism! I made a dream-catcher made from some plates.

This is cool, but honestly kind of a deranged question to ask.

Thought it was just me. Used to have at least twice this many in my old office:

No but now I know what to do with my old hard drive that failed :)

That's a funny looking Stanley cup.

Dude's the Predator of the IT world

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What

I don't have the space to hoard garbage.

No

I use them as coffee mats...

Yes. The magnets are ridiculously strong. Several hold screen in place on my heat exchanger, to keep leaves and lawn debris at bay.

Haven’t figured out a good use for the platters, but skeet shooting has crossed my mind.

No, because I am worried the NSA may try to collate data from them. In fact, I zero-wipe, drill bit the drives in the platters and the PCB, and drop them off at e-waste for recycling.

Nope, but now I wish i did

I used to make clocks with the platters and give them to friends and family. Michael's used to sell inexpensive clock mechanisms that looked really cool against the platter background. I haven't seen them lately, but I'm sure someone sells them online.

And here I thought I had a lot of hdd platter coaster's.

I thought you made a custom thermos bottle at first

Holy crap. I don’t, but after seeing that I think I’ll need to start

Macabre.

Yet also (bitter-)sweet, those drives gave everything they had for you, it's only right to honor their memory & remember them.

I just open the drives & put them on shelves.

I have like 30 old hard drives laying around and have been thinking about doing a cool art installation with them for a while.

Maybe shatter the platters to create a spiky landscape and epoxy them in, or something like that.

Any ideas?

I will keep the magnets if I ever get into this in the future, but not the platters. I'll just safely destroy them and dispose of them.

So far I only had 3 laptops and no desktops. I had 0 HDD failures, since I only ever had 3 of them so far.
The oldest one is more than 17 years old 80GB 2.5" Fujitsu HDD.

That's funny, that's exactly the method I stored my cdRoms back in the day.

Curious about the age of the oldest one

Magnets, yes. Great for the fridge!

I keep the magnets, but I shred the platters. 'cause magnets are cool.

I would take those and the adhesive rubber feet that you would get with switches and make coasters out of them to give away.

In a distant post-apocalyptic future, the survivors will use hard drive platters as a currency.

My daughter's drawings are held on my fridge with old HDD magnets.

Both of my autistic kids love magents. I will pull them from old drives, car/pc speakers, or anything else that has them.

... I didn't but I guess I could start?

Platters make good coasters

A common public toilet till machine has a keyhole that looks like a coin slot. Turns out, HDD magnets are the perfect shape to fish out any coins mistakenly thrown in there.

I do that to my dead drives, but I’ve only had one fail that wasn’t an SSD. Moreso because the washers that separate the platters have a very satisfying ring to them that makes me keep them as a fidget toy.

I use the magnets to hold screws, it works great for that.

Unfortunately, SSDs have less interesting parts, so I just take them apart to destroy the chips after failure

Every time, without fail, though I haven't decided what I want to do with them yet.

The older IDE drives with the 5.25" platters and smaller ones make great wind chimes. The laptop ones are a bit .ore fragile due to thinner material. Years ago, we used to do this with a few of them.

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No, but you do, and I like this ob-jay-dar

I use old platters to hang around our chicken houses. The idea is to distract hawks and eagles with the sparkle as they spin in the breeze... Probably doesn't work, but I like the shiny disks :)

I used to collect AOL cds. I had a stack a few feet high. I was going to make some sort of artwork out of them.

Nice : )

Yes. Got to admit mine just isn't as big as yours, though.

Challenge accepted. I'll post our collection tomorrow! I used some magnets to hold up a white board last week too. Hahaha

There's some really fun chemistry in the rare-earth magnets - I used to buy them in bulk to enlarge my own IT-workshop collection, which was mostly broken down for Nd salts. Also, the magnets from iMac screens were also plentiful when HDD magnets got small (and then went extinct).

I've been lucky enough to not have a drive die on me yet.

I'm much more interested in your kit in the background.

Now I am feeling sorry I did not...

I need to start doing that

I use the old disks as costers

I wish I got that many hard drives just so I could do this.

I havest them for the BlooDisk God Linuxathor, we are not the same.

This man self-hosts

Back in the day I bought a fridge freezer combo, second hand, no handles. Used to be a built in model. As handles I used two magnets from full height drives, they were ludicrously strong and shaped like a little bit like a handle.

Full height drives were 3.25" high for those who are wondering.

dude what the fuck, why are you going through so many drives

Stanley

What are they made of anyways?? Could one see any etching marks with a microscope?

I used to. Magnets on old hard drives were better. Any drive I've taken apart over the last ten years or so are smaller and more brittle. Not as worth taking apart.

No but I wish I had been. 😑

That's amazing. Jaw dropping.

I thought I was cool for making a clock one time.

I don't want to ruin your fun, but the last time I saw a post like this on reddit, the top comment was: "Don't open hard drives. They contain micro particles from wear and tear, that are as dangerous as asbestos."

Edit: I found the post and comment. The issue mentioned was the cobalt. https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/17il3i3/comment/k6veo9c/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

Edit2: I went and searched a bit. This meta-analysis says they found no increased cancer risk for exposure to cobalt particles. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0273230021001288

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Considering they're covered in toxic shit, nope.

I use SSDs