Found laptops on the street fully abused and often smashed to bits. Recently pulled a 160gb SSD out of one. That’s worth keeping, as well as the RAM, often.

TV tuners/media players: they sometimes have internal hard drives. I recently pulled a 320gb 2½″ HDD out of one. Even though that’s likely too small to serve as someone’s laptop system, anything bigger than 120gb is big enough to store a copy of the whole Debian system including all apps (5 blu-rays merged these days).

All DC powered electronics: it’s useful to cannabalize the female barrel connector. There are many universal PSUs with a collection of male tips, but never female tips. The female tips are useful for making your own barrel adapters, instead of cutting and soldering your OEM PSUs.

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[–] 11 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 child)

SSDs, even 120gb ones, are definitely useful in this day and age. A year ago you could just buy a brand name 120 or 500 gb SSD for cheap for throwing into an old PC. Now a days a new 500gb SATA Samsung SSD is $274 CAD.

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  • [–] 5 points 6 months ago

    Yeah, you can buy a cheap USB-to-SATA boards/cables (or enclosure) and use them as USB drives. I have an rPi booting off an old SATA-HDD (more durable than micro-sd in my experience). Unraid supports arrays with mixed sized disks too, so you could make a NAS.

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