[ale] Off Topic, hard drive shredder

[Jeff Hubbs]

On 8/5/11 12:47 AM, Sparr wrote:
> I've recently come into possession of a large security disintegrator,
> designed for shredding things like hard drives and tapes and such. I'm
> trying to figure out what to do with it. Selling it is, of course, an
> option, but I was thinking of possibly starting up a small security
> business to destroy hard drives for people. Is there a market for that
> in Atlanta?
It would make a big difference if your apparatus of mindless destruction 
were mobile.  But you are going to have a waste stream like nobody's 
business; some of that will be leaded solder, which is toxic.  One thing 
you could certainly do without too much difficulty would be to separate 
out the ground-up magnets; run the refuse past a piece of iron that gets 
scraped off periodically.  I don't know what all the composition of disk 
drive magnets would be in the field - I'd suspect samarium cobalt and 
neodymium.  What you recover could potentially be press-formed into 
fairly decent magnets, suitable for electricity generation, but as far 
as actually separating out the metals into bulk material with a net 
positive value, I dunno.

Possessing this device only makes sense if it's actively being used, so, 
congratulations on having entered the waste processing business! :)