Free computer goodies?

[malada]

There's the old Novell server room at work. The order has gone out that it's to be cleared out and everything in it thrown away. The Novell system was ditched around 2012.

They let me have dibs.

What I've already looted: operating system DVDs and manuals, lots of loose CAT 5 cables, two desktops and a Mac Powerbook from 2010, some loose hard drives, two 4x3 flatscreen monitors and some odds and ends.

What I *won't* be taking is the 3 or 4 old Novell servers and the off-line data server. I don't take equipment that I can't lift and I definitely can't lift those puppies. I won't be taking the boxes of backup tapes that went with the servers or the APC battery backups - they're probably dead and I can't lift them.

I'm leaving the two - eight port KVM switches. The older ones can't handle resolutions over 800x600.

However, there is a pile of around two dozen USB IOmega external hard drives. I've tested a few of them and they're usage dates between 2011 - 2012. They have one terarbyte hard drives in them. So, they're over ten years old but have fairly low usage.

I can still look at the data - it uses some program called VERITAS to back up things. I haven't tried reading them.

I'm not sure what I'd do with two dozen external 1 terabyte hard drives but I'd hate to see them just go to the dump. If I take them I'll DBAN them, create new partition tables and format them - probably in NTFS (Windows). Most are missing their little power supplies and USB cables so I suspect that they were either tossed or there's a stash of them... somewhere.

Thoughts?

Comments

[siliconshaman]

I'd find someone more muscular than you and see if you can persuade them to help you loot the old servers too.. then set up a home server farm.

Failing that, you now have a pile of old 1Tb drives to gift to your friends if you like... or you know, set up a usb based NAS.

[malada]

Oh I can get help taking them to the trunk of my car - getting them out afterwards and horsing them around to play with them - that's the problem.

I'm a wimp.

The other thing is these are power hungry beasts and I don't really want to heat the basement with them. I had to shut down one of my Folding @ Home systems because it was pulling 300 watts (Xeon chips are great but power hungry) while my main rig only pulls 150 watts while Folding.

I'd love to go solar but I'll need a new roof soon and I can't really place enough panels on my roof to make it worth while.

[acelightning73]

So, the company is doing a forklift upgrade? They have to bring rack-mounted megacomputers and switching devices in with a forklift.

I remember when IOmega Drives were found to have a lot of problems. They recommended getting rid of them before they failed hard.

[malada]

Ooo! Do you have a link to that information?

[acelightning73]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iomega

The "click of death" Iomega Zip drives were prone to turned out to limit their usefulness.

[malada]

It looks like that issue was with early models. Mine date from 2010 at the earliest. I think the drives will be okay.

Thanks!

[moxie_man]

Too bad I'm not closer to you. My father still does scrap as a side-hustle in his retirement. Portions would go to the dump (plastic coverings), but the contents would be properly recycled.