Our neighbors are moving back to Canada, and in a box of old computer junk I offered to make go away, there were a couple of external drives. Wayne wasn’t sure if they had data on them. I offered to find out, if possible, and sanitize them.

The smaller had a long-deprecated Mini-AB USB port. It’s been a while since I had a cable that would fit the early-2000s USB port, so I pulled out the 2.5″ 160 GB drive, clamped it in the vice, and gave it a couple of smacks with a hammer. Ta.

The other was a monster by comparison, a 5.25″ drive manufactured in 2003 with a capacity of (drum roll, please) 5 GB! It looked like an old Apple Firewire connection–again, nothing like that lying around. I was unable or unwilling to completely disassemble the hard drive assembly, so I drilled a few holes through the drive. Ta.

The case was an aluminum wonder which I planned to recycle, but after mentioning to a couple of people that you could probably run over it with a car without hurting it, I knew what I had to do.

Yup.

That would have been a very well protected 5 GB of data!

I didn’t remember when I bought this hard drive (I thought 2004). It was an HP product with an unalterable HP partition, designed for Windows backups. Which I probably never used it for. That was a bother, but even more of a bother was my trying to overwrite the disk so I could give it away. My command-line Linux magic simply rendered it unusable, unmountable, impossible to format in Linux or MacOS.

So, impossible to erase. All my data still on there.

However, that raises a question:

Short answer: That being said, if you just want a quick rule of thumb for how long you can expect the hard drive in your laptop should last, we’d say you should be prepared for disk failure after three years of use. source

Of course, this was not in constant use. But, at 13 years and four months, it is now retired. And my data safe.

Though we’ve had Mac Minis for almost ten years, I only today discovered they have a slot for an SDXC memory card. I have some of those somewhere, I thought.

Yikes! 16 megabytes? That must be from our first digital camera 20 years ago. Each would hold exactly three photos now at 10 megapixels.

I was reminded of the 128 megabyte flash drive I ran across recently.

Not really sure why I hang on to these things.