[fpp]

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.

[brianwski]

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

[kikoreis]

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

[ams6110]

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

[teraflop]

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.

[deelowe]

Degaussers render the drive nonfunctional.

[SteveNuts]

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.

[jerguismi]

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.

[theandrewbailey]

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...