On Reddit, a user recounts how he unexpectedly came across several hard drives during a household clearance. But what he later finds in the boxes causes great excitement.
How did the discovery come about? A buyer came across a household clearance in the USA via Craigslist – a kind of technical flea market where individuals sell their household items. He had actually hoped to find old film cameras.
As the magazine Toms Hardware reported, he instead discovered six external WD Easystore 8TB hard drives, offered at $90 each. He asked if he could get a better price if he bought them all and negotiated down to $60 each. Thus, he ended up paying only $360 (about €310) for the six devices.
Shortly thereafter, he shared his find on Reddit with the Data-Hoarder community, as the real stroke of luck followed only at home. The buyer took several additional packages that the seller claimed contained only cables. At home, he found that five of them contained additional 8TB hard drives. He contacted the seller to return them, but the seller simply said: “Keep them.”
Anyone interested in unusual storage projects will likely also find the video about “Dead Drops” intriguing – USB sticks that are permanently embedded in walls.
Terabytes in Dust – a Find Among Forgotten Items
What is the condition of the hard drives? Before the user removed the drives, he checked them with a SMART tool – a standard procedure to read the condition and usage time of hard drives. It turned out that all eleven hard drives had zero operational hours. This means they were completely unused and apparently had never been in operation before, even though the drives were already from 2017 and 2018.
What makes the deal so special? Overall, the user received 88 terabytes of storage for $360 (approximately €310), which corresponds to about $4 per terabyte. In comparison: A single WD Easystore 8TB costs around $170 (approximately €146) at retail. The total value of his eleven hard drives is thus nearly $1,870 (approximately €1,600).
Especially for tech enthusiasts who archive large amounts of data, such as for media, servers, or backups, so much storage at such a low price is almost unbeatable. Such bargains often only arise in private sales, where the true value of the technology is not always known.
This is what happens now with the hard drives: On Reddit, the user reports that he removed the hard drives from their enclosures, a process known as “shucking.” This involves taking the drives out of their external enclosures to use them directly as internal HDDs in NAS systems or server cases. This is cheaper than buying internal enterprise hard drives; however, opening them usually voids the warranty.
The Easystore models contain different HDDs depending on the production period. In this case, the user found five white-label drives of type WD80EMAZ as well as four WD Red models, including two WD80EFZX and two WD80EFAX. These are particularly popular for continuous use in NAS systems.
While some are surprised by how much storage they get when buying technology, others experience the exact opposite. For example, a user was baffled by his supposedly 20TB hard drive – it did not work. When his son finally opened it, the reason became clear: Inside were not electronics, but six heavy iron weights.
