At what price point does a hard drive become scrap? I am talking an run-of-the mill IDE hard drive. I know and understand lost's viewpoint on selling used hard drives, but at some point it is worth more as scrap anyway. I have some 40 and 80 gig WD drives that are bringing @ $2 on ebay. I was trying to figure if they were worth more as scrap? I will have about as much time in scrapping one as boxing and shipping one.

Its going to depend on how you break them down. You can scrap them as is(won't bring much) or take the boards off of them and scrap those separately then sell the hard drives without boards. If you want to go even further and do some microscrap work you could open up the hard drives and pull the platters. So thats 3 different things you could be scrapping(HD no board, HD Board, & HD Platters). Prices are listed just figure out the weight and go from there. I wipe and scrap every hard drive that comes into my warehouse as I'm not interested in selling them and waiting on them to sell as I need to get things moved for more processing space.

CoCo The Geek

_________________
CoCo The Geek
Atlanta, GA Electronic Recycler
http://www.cocothegeek.com
support@cocothegeek.com

Agreed. Once you take the logic board off (you would be very silly not to) you can be done right there if you just want to scrap the rest of the HDD as dirty Aluminum. If you want to break down to get clean components, with about three screwdrivers and some practice, you can get it done in about 4 minutes.
When I get bored, I take a stack of about 40-50 hard drives and just do a scrap-a-thon, especially when it gets cold, since they don't take up much space and you can do them indoors.
On the other hand, if you receive a 1TB HDD and you're thinking of scrapping, you can buy a decently affordable HDD dock online, download some free software to scan for bad sectors. If you can sell one or two decent hard drives, the dock pays for itself. You can usually reformat the drives while inside the dock as well. And the hard drives are fairly easy to pack and ship. Of course, there's risk: hard drives are delicate, etc.
Just a thought. Really these days, anything below 250GB is fairly useless unless someone is specifically looking for a tiny drive for a rebuild, but you'll be waiting for a while for a sale. 500GB and up are saleable items, anything in the Terrabyte range will sell pretty quickly.

The research to determine the price point, time it takes to test and wipe, the time to list, then the wait for someone to buy yours and not the other 500 that are already listed, and then the time to package and run it to the post office, and then wait and see if the customer is happy and does not want to return it.

Yup I'm just scrapping it. So much less hassle and time.

Without being mean my first comment here is: anyone who says IDE and ATA are the same, or uses terms interchangeably, is ignorant. And from a sales standpoint; a fool.
IDE predates ATA. It was grandfathered into the ATA spec. The wiring is different. The controllers are different. The language is different... everything is different. Except the port and socket layout.
80 pin IDE exists up to apx ~20MB. And 40 pin drives up to Apx ~50MB.
A true IDE drive, fully intact and working, with the manual (needed for proper LLF) can fetch hundreds of dollars.
An equivalent 40/50MB ATA will catch $1-$5.
Only 2 brands of IDE to ATA adaptor cards were ever released and they too run hundreds of dollars.


I don’t sell post IDE mechanical hard drives: period! Full stop.

That said:!
Most of the people I know have a close matched consensus on what to sell.
Anything 4GB or under is worth the trouble. The smaller the drive the higher the value. 10MB drives that are proven working (drvtst etc printout) can easily flip for $50. 2MB drives are almost equal in value.
The other side of the divide is anything over 500GBs. Between one and ten cents per GB is common. From 4GBs to 500GBs it’s around 25-50 cents per gig based on the original value depreciation and your competition is low end flash memory.
Bobby is found to spend $50 on a 500GB drive when they can get a 512GB 4th gen SD and a USB3.2 reader combo for $40.

Amiga and Apple fans tend to to want 10, 20, and 40 meg IDE or SCSI drives.
Commodore users look forward 5MB and 10MB IDE drives.
Users of 16-but and earlier sega gear tend to want 20MB IDE drives.
Nintendo fans though look for tiny SATA or SAS drives. The FDS and 64DDS are proprietary serial. Hack cards Accommodate up to 512GB. Most take 1GB or less though.

32-bit users tend to look for under 750GB for OS support.
16-bit users tend to want under 100MBs for file system options.

_________________
42 6F 61 72 64 73 6F 72 74 2E 63 6F 6D

The smallest drive that I have ever scrapped is 20 gig. So all those expensive small drives you are talking about are a mute point for me. Now I do get a few of those big drives. 500 gig and bigger but its not worth my time to go through all the hassle as I described in my first post, more so when you can go on any sell site and there already hundreds of them for sale. Also when I have customers that want me to destroy the drive. Could you imagine if one of my customers looks and sees I'm selling drives instead of destroying them. How would I prove that the drives I'm selling are not theirs. It is not worth trying to get a few bucks for a couple of drives here and there and then losing a source of e scrap in the process.

Lost you should be happy that I scrap them considering that there is less listings to compete with for you or anyone else.

By all means sell if you like or scrap if you like. I'm not here insulting or telling anyone what they should or shouldn't do. I'm telling you what I do.

I fully agree with you. Figured if the OP really wanted to sell over scrap I could at least post ranges that do sell with less competition and higher price ranges.

It’s very rare I sell a hard drive.
In reality when I can buy a brand new in clamshell seagate 250 7200+ for $10 there’s not much reason to buy a used one.

_________________
42 6F 61 72 64 73 6F 72 74 2E 63 6F 6D

This is my tester rig. I run Hiren's BootCD off a SFF I dug out of a warehouse. Cut a hole in the side of the case to poke the SATA/Power through and eventually even found the Startech Dock in the same warehouse haul. I figure the scrap Gods were shining blessings upon me.

Generally speaking I only sell sealed in vacuum bag drives (there is still evidently a strong demand for even older 36GB Seagate Server drives and whatnot) but I did get a bunch of possibly worth testing and selling 2 TB drives out of the bag.

Nice setup. Close to what I did by using expansion cables and a dual disk laptop.

I’ve been shipping stuff for a LONG time and I’m quite sure I can get a hard drive from A to B intact no matter what shipping company employees do.
I’m quite sure the majority of doa drives are working happily inside the recipient’s computer.

I’m willing to mess around with enterprise drives since they cost a fortune.
Anything over 12TB. And there won’t be any refunds without returning the drive. Lol.
And anything under 100MB. Since the hobby community tends to put out less fraud in sales/reception.

I use the SAS cables from the laptop to test SAS and SATA.
I have an old 8080 IBM with a Hercules data card I use for IDE and SCSI. And a happy USB dock for ATA drives.
I have a FuguIta fork for the IBM. It’s basically original BSD88/86 with some back ported tool kits. Not much but but it works. And those old I/O cards can be reprogrammed by changing jumpers around so I can set it to different interface commands. For old drives. And while It won’t run Crisis but it chugs along for Cave Adventure.

The Linux technical tool kit works wonderfully on the laptop.

_________________
42 6F 61 72 64 73 6F 72 74 2E 63 6F 6D

Interesting idea re/ the SAS drives. I think I have an extra SAS card laying around come to think of it.