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PostPosted: Thu Dec 23, 2021 10:54 pm 
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For those wondering, here’s how small things are now getting.
And this is a 3.5” drive!


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PostPosted: Fri Dec 24, 2021 3:58 pm 

Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2019 6:55 pm
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I have scrapped a handful of those drives, they are too small so it takes a lot of them to get a pound, but they are held on with only a few screws so it makes the drive faster to destroy.

I don't pull laptop drives apart anymore, I remove the board and hit them with a hammer to break the platters inside and throw them in my irony aluminum bucket to go to my local yard.


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PostPosted: Tue Jan 04, 2022 10:14 am 

Joined: Thu Aug 13, 2015 10:53 pm
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It has 3 nice bga's, looks like some nice chunky MLCC's and of course there is gold plate on the connector. Yeah its small and doesn't weigh much but there is still plenty of PM's there.

To me its like your saying that a laptop stick of ram is worth less per pound than a desktop stick of ram because of size.


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PostPosted: Tue Jan 04, 2022 4:21 pm 
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Mwfhawk wrote:
To me its like your saying that a laptop stick of ram is worth less per pound than a desktop stick of ram because of size.


Sort of.
Here we have the reduction of 9 ICs down to three. Less chips means less solder. Less tracing. Less everything.

On ram: 64GB DDR4 on a DIMM set out as 8x8GB is more valuable than an SODIMM in 4x16!
Less chips? Less traces. Smaller board? Shorter traces.
Not to mention smaller process creates smaller bonding. So the value of each chip’s materials decreases.

The smaller something get the less material is used. Less material equals lower value.
Much the same way a 12 oz can has less value than 16oz or 20oz cans.

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PostPosted: Tue Jan 04, 2022 4:40 pm 

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So your saying a half a pound of copper has less value per pound than three forth of a pound of copper?

It only has less because it has less area to fill. less area also means less worthless fiberglass, plastic, and fiber. sure it takes more small hard drive boards to make a pound than it does large hard drive boards. But you will have more ics, connectors, mlcc and so on because you have less area.


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PostPosted: Tue Jan 04, 2022 5:30 pm 
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Exactly on the first line.

The second is, … more difficult.
As ic production processes get smaller, the quantity of materials used also shrinks.

Eg
Otherwise identical:
An 8086 ceramic nickel leg 40 pin dip from 1982 uses more material than a plastic compact moulded 40 pin dip from 2014. The die shrink reduces every aspect of material use.
Now take that 2014 dip chip and move the die into a 12nm organic flip chip quad. The value of materials has once again shrunk. Significantly. Not just the size.

It’s true you have less board. But you also have considerably less everything.

The most dramatic example I can give is to look at an Atari 2600. The value of the original machine board low telco, and compare that to the Atari Go (aka flashback). High peripheral. Same machine. Much smaller.
Less chips. Smaller process.
Less everything.

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PostPosted: Wed Jan 05, 2022 5:14 pm 

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Also, nice Mercury Dime


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PostPosted: Wed Jan 05, 2022 7:19 pm 
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Thanks. :)

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PostPosted: Fri Jan 07, 2022 10:07 pm 

Joined: Sun May 17, 2015 4:17 pm
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We as scrappers just have to revamp our scrapping to the new pricing just as we have done all along as prices go up and go down depending on metal values. This is just another bump in the road, a road that actually has been more golden then in the past with the prices of all scrap metals being at the high end. Steel (and steel variations), aluminum, copper,and brass all have jumped in value most of last year into this year so far and gold holding fairly steady. We just have to keep in mind when we buy items to scrap that smaller means less weight as in small form computers as opposed to full size towers. All components have less weight so have less value per unit so we just have to adjust what we pay. We have to redo what we did before scrap a smaller unit check weights and get new payout value and adjust new purchase price. In the end we make money while we help the environment. WE DO GOOD.


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PostPosted: Fri Jan 14, 2022 2:40 am 
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mdesscrapper wrote:
We just have to keep in mind when we buy items to scrap that smaller means less weight as in small form computers as opposed to full size towers.


Another rule that is right more than wrong:
The newer it is the less it’s worth compared to its predecessor.

A ci7 from the nasa/usaf rickets will fetch a few hundred dollars in raw scrap: each. It’s a MCC the size of a piece of paper.
A via cha does nearly the same and is worth just a few cents as pinless.

My Atari example.

Let’s go extreme. A 10,000 dollar 1975 AV receiver with tuner with 6 input (RF, Paired copper) and 2 outputs—4 speaker terminals and RF— will fetch $50-$100 in raw scrap today.
A $50,000 receiver today will fetch about $25-$50 in raw scrap. Or less.
What was once etched gold and silver tracing and copper sheets gave way to gold wire gave way to todays <5nm processes of micro thread.
The cost of making has gone up. The materials value has gone down.

At Atari Woz was able to stuff half a meg into an 8” disk… but required 3 times the hardware to do so.
Bandshell put 500MB on an IBM hard disk platter… using a server sized writing cluster of mechanics!

Yesterday we had a full meg on a credit card called PCMCIA.

Today we have 500TB on a CD. Called Holographic 3D storage.

Two things are a constant in tech.
The same stuff does more
Less stuff does the same.

The reduction in materials to ability is measured in near infinite 0 ratios.
Meters became mili became micro became nano.
The Z8n, a variant of the 8080, is still used today. As a few dozen lines of code.
What took todays-value $100+ in materials now takes up a few microns of space.

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