Hardware recycling

One of the things i love to do is open up old hardware that needs to get scrapped. Reason is not to learn from it, but to see if i can reuse stuff from it. Mainly old pc’s i find interesting. Main boards i don’t really have a new use for, and even CPU’s i skip. I go straight for fan’s, hard disks, power supply and dvd burners (or higher).

Recently my parents called me that their hard disk recorder wasn’t working anymore. Luckily we got a new one, so the old one would move the bed room and the old one on the bed room would be scrapped. So with our old hard disk recorder i went to my parents house, swapped both devices and TV card and 2 minutes later they could watch TV again. I grabbed their old recorder and went back home. Never had the intention to retest the old recorder and put it away.

Last Saturday, when i almost killed myself, i was looking for the correct tools to open the recorder. I don’t have those security torx so i had to drill out the 3 screws on the back and got it open. Thank god the hard disk was only with Philips head screws, but i noticed something i didn’t expect from a company like Cisco (it was the Cisco 8485DVB btw), the hard disk was mounted upside down. When i was a little intern i once mounted a disk upside down, because the flat cables wasn’t long enough, well my colleague wasn’t amused about it. I never did that again. But back to the story: i never really checked what the size of the disk might be in that device and was really surprised when i found a 320 GB Western Digital (WD3200AAJS) in the recorder. It isn’t a really fast disk, but if you want to create some backups, or use it to store music on them, it’s a nice peace hardware to retrieve from “old garbage”.

Ow and i also grabbed the front panel print board. Maybe i can reuse it for project or something or finally learn something about electronics. 😉

PS. if you do this, there are a couple of things to remind(!):
– If you open up electronics, physically unplug them, and wait for a couple of hours. This is so all condensators are empty. I you touch them while they contain power, you can really get a shock.
– The hardware you don’t need, please recycle.