[brongondwana]

I wonder how many will die before they age out of usefulness. If you're still spinning 250Gb hard disks which are using the same power and space that a 4Tb drive could be using - it might not actually be economically sensible to keep running them.

Certainly the old 9.1Gb SCSI disks that were so popular 10 years ago are well past be justifiable to give power to now.

[outworlder]

That may be true for blackblaze.

But these drives will still be useful. What about, say, shipping them to ONGs located in Africa?

[skriticos2]

That's a horrible idea! The logistics to collect and ship the old tech to Africa alone would probably cost more then just buying it bulk from China and ship in one batch.

But there are other considerations:

* This would also result in a big pile of waste in Africa, as their recycling infrastructure is limited.

* They need food, shelter, stable politics and functional education before they can make any use of computers.

* They have limited energy supply. Low powered tablets / laptops are much more useful.

[mavhc]

http://africa-is-not-a-country.we-magazine.net/

[alfor]

You could not believe the price they have to pay for computer. It is easily 3x, 4x the price we pay for the same hardware. And I they do need computer.

But, it is possible that the logistic/shipping is more expensive than the production of new hardware.

Also, cheaper more energy efficient hardware could be more cost effective.

source: A friend of mine worked for ong in Burkina Faso

[skriticos2]

I do believe you. It's economics of scale: they don't have it.

While most of the western world has huge fright ship docks that can load/unload and ship relatively price efficient, Africa does not.

This means, the primary means to ship stuff there is via airplane, which is notoriously weight constrained, which in turn makes shipping bulk goods expensive.

This makes shipping newer, lighter tech even more cost effective than old hardware.

p.s. This is probably true for anything they need to import, not just tech.

[mattlutze]

I'd be curious to hear more about your history in international shipping, particularly to countries in Africa.

Many countries on the continent appear to have rather robust capacity for their economies.

http://ports.com/browse/africa/map-view/

[mrgriscom]

I think a lot of that price is actually import duties.

[outworlder]

Maybe at such scale.

I don't think that's an horrible idea, because I routinely donate old computer tech to non-profits, which do make use of it. Usually to assemble computers for children. Granted, this has negligible cost to me, as we are in the same country.

When one has access to cheap tech from the BestBuy just around the corner, it is difficult to imagine how expensive it can be in third world countries. It may also be difficult to understand how incredibly old are some of the computers that do exist.

I can't believe that it would be so expensive to ask people and companies to donate their old "junk", fill up a container and ship it.

> This would also result in a big pile of waste in Africa, as their recycling infrastructure is limited.

That may be so. That much tech waste could also create the necessary conditions for a recycling industry to start. Assuming that it doesn't already.

> They need food, shelter, stable politics and functional education before they can make any use of computers.

Is that so? Can't computers help them achieve those goals?

> They have limited energy supply. Low powered tablets / laptops are much more useful.

Yes, many locations completely lack power and ordinary desktop computers wouldn't work. But I don't think that's true for all african countries.

[JoeAltmaier]

Agreed. Better yet, keep them in a Google data center. Its far more efficient to make cloud storage available at a reasonable price. How about a diskless laptop that boots from cloud storage? That would be a sweet spot economically (depending on network costs I guess).

[ancarda]

>How about a diskless laptop that boots from cloud storage?

While this is a cool idea, how much bandwidth would you need to boot at roughly the same speed you do today? Some SSDs have 500 MB/s (~4 Gbit) read. You'd need to have gigabit networking with almost zero latency for that to perform well.

I suppose a smaller OS like Chrome OS would be perfect for that. Even if this worked on fiber, how would you boot over a cellular network? Aside from costing you a ton of money, it would take forever to download.

[JoeAltmaier]

Time is a fungible commodity. E.g. boot time may affect bottom line (rhyme!) in the EU; it can be different in Africa.

[rdc12]

How reliable are the networks in Africa? Outside of the cities?

[JoeAltmaier]

I'm thinking, because they got network late, maybe better than my house in Iowa. I'm still on copper.

[barrkel]

I suspect the overheads of collection, shipping and distribution would dwarf the savings from not buying the optimal price/GB drive du jour.

Hard drive space per dollar grows exponentially, and they're big weighty things. The window of time where it would be economical to reuse would be short, and value dubious.

[DanBC]

Here's a tv programme about the e-waste dump in Agbogbloshie, Accra, Ghana. It's probably on the Internet somewhere. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00sch78)

[nodata]

Even with the energy used for shipping them end-to-end?