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Comment by fpp | Hacker News Reader

I'll see from your reports that you're migrating 1000s of 2TB drives to 8TB drives - what is actually happening to your old 2TB drives?

Guess you are not throwing those away so what are you doing with them.

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Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze. We securely wipe the drives, then we sell them to a "used hard drive reseller".

I know it's a lot easier to wholesale resell them, but it'd be so awesome if you could dedicate a portion to be sold to the homelabbers among us.

I don't know how that would be more awesome, essentially spending effort towards the upper middle-class hobbyists. I would rather see them sell them directly to the highest bidder and focus the effort on improving their business, or give the drives to charity.

Does "secure wipe" mean ATA SE, i.e. hdparm --security-erase, or --security-erase-enhanced?

For that volume I'd think a degausser would be used.

AFAIK, if you physically destroy the contents of a drive with a strong magnetic field, you also destroy the servo tracks, rendering the drive useless. Modern hard drives can't "low-level format" themselves; they're not mechanically precise enough.

Degaussers render the drive nonfunctional.

They were reusing their 1TB drives to test new pods with. But I think they would only need a hundred or so for that, unless they die faster in that workload.

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-q4-201...

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