Nice, it's all good for free.

Something I have been pondering on recently is how I never seem to get near dumpsters any more in the normal course of life. A decade or so back, I'd be near a dumpster, look in dumpster, sometimes get lucky. I am wondering what changed. Though it seems now that while stores and other places had overflow parking near the dumpsters, the dumpsters are now kind of in separate fenced off areas with locked gates.

I have vague memories of news stories some way back about a homeless dude getting smothered to death in a dumpster, and/or someone getting an artery ripped open on broken glass while rummaging, barely surviving, and then suing the store. So maybe there has been an insurance liability effect going on. Not sure how area specific this is. Whether it's my township, region, or province or what.

Anyway, these days doubt I have time and energy to "go out of my way" to find dumpsters to look in sadly.

Probably also, stores want dumpsters out of the way for not being pretty to look at?

H3nrik V! wrote on 2024-12-17, 15:08:

Probably also, stores want dumpsters out of the way for not being pretty to look at?

Data loss prevention. Too many occurrences of documents or hard drives with >=confidential info getting lifted from the trash.

douglar wrote on 2024-12-17, 19:33:

H3nrik V! wrote on 2024-12-17, 15:08:

Probably also, stores want dumpsters out of the way for not being pretty to look at?

Data loss prevention. Too many occurrences of documents or hard drives with >=confidential info getting lifted from the trash.

True that. Anything I am able to get my dirty paws on is also without storage - or at least thoroughly wiped storage ..

10 years ago I got a rack full of HP DL145's. Worthless at the time but I kept a few as shelves in the rack.

This week I suddenly had an epihpany regarding these.

Still had four of these, three of which I was able to access.
Went and pluck out:
- 6pcs AMD Opteron 248 (Sledgehammer)
- 12x 1GB DDR ECC REG
- 2x Maxtor Diamondmax plus 9 160GB
- One Seagate barracuda 7200.9 160GB.

Mostly went for the HDD's. Can't have enough. No idea of these work though. Happily all three have a jumper for a 32GB limit 😀

Not super old, but picked up a Dell Optiplex AIO with a Haswell i3, 4 or 8gb of ram and a 500gb HDD for $20. Got an i7-4790 on order for it and going to drop a 500gb SATA SSD in it. Should make a sick little system for my Nephew for Christmas. It has TPM 2.0 on it, so should be able to put Windows 11 on it.
Unfortunately it appears that the AMD 2gb R7 A265 option is unobtainable, so the HD4600 graphics will have to suffice.

Not retro at all....but this has zero hours on it and less than 10 power cycles, it works and was thrown away! It had some data on it which I erased.

eesz34 wrote on 2024-12-23, 17:38:

Not retro at all....but this has zero hours on it and less than 10 power cycles, it works and was thrown away! It had some data on it which I erased.

I sound something similar once when opening up a retro laptop I received from eBay.

2.5" IDE SSD surprise found in old "for parts" laptop

This must have been very expensive for the time. I don't know what it would be useful for now. I ended up replacing it with a 16GB CF card on an adapter.

eesz34 wrote on 2024-12-23, 17:38:

Not retro at all....but this has zero hours on it and less than 10 power cycles, it works and was thrown away! It had some data on it which I erased.

That's Micro Center's house brand. Their brand parts are quite good. And free makes that even better.

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2024-12-23, 19:26:

eesz34 wrote on 2024-12-23, 17:38:

Not retro at all....but this has zero hours on it and less than 10 power cycles, it works and was thrown away! It had some data on it which I erased.

That's Micro Center's house brand. Their brand parts are quite good. And free makes that even better.

Don't be so sure. Last year, Micro Center actually had an offer where it was giving away house brand SSD cards to customers for free. And were 256GB drives, even. I don't think a purchase was even necessary. Pretty crazy.

Unsurprisingly, those SSDs weren't very good in terms of speed. But hey, something about not looking a gift horse in its mouth. 😉 Even slower SSDs have plenty of good uses.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/micro-cente … -free-256gb-ssd

eesz34 wrote on 2024-12-23, 17:38:

Not retro at all....but this has zero hours on it and less than 10 power cycles, it works and was thrown away! It had some data on it which I erased.

One thing to watch for with low end SSDs I've noticed is that they are more prone to slow drive speeds when run at less than their rated maximum speed (SATA3 run at ATA100) than name brand drives such as Samsung and Kingston. My guess is that the name brands have better firmware which is designed to deliver max speed no matter what interface is used.

This isn't a problem for slower processors that are incapable of saturating the bus. With super fast industrial SSDs, I've found that many older machines fall well below theoretical speed of the controller.

Kahenraz wrote on 2024-12-26, 03:30:

This isn't a problem for slower processors that are incapable of saturating the bus. With super fast industrial SSDs, I've found that many older machines fall well below theoretical speed of the controller.

It's just something you need to be aware of. I used a Silicon Power SSD with my Asus P5Q Pro (SATA 1.5) and I was mystified as to why the read write speeds were so slow. I swapped the SP for a Team Group SSD and then I was able to achieve the speed that the system was capable of. I then tried the Silicon Power drive in a SATA 3.0 system, and it worked as it should.

I misunderstood. I thought you were talking about running on the ATA bus. You meant ATA-like speed on the SATA bus. I have heard that modern drives might not play well with early generation SATA controllers.

Kahenraz wrote on 2024-12-26, 03:49:

I have heard that modern drives might not play well with early generation SATA controllers.

I think I heard this in the same place you did, and I tested a recent drive on one of the first SATA motherboards ever sold and it worked fine. It may just be an issue with specific drives and\or SATA chipsets.

This thread also covers this issue in detail, and it seems like Via's early SATA implementations were the main issue, and they didn't even necessarily like running on SATAII drives.

Kahenraz wrote on 2024-12-26, 03:49:

I misunderstood. I thought you were talking about running on the ATA bus. You meant ATA-like speed on the SATA bus. I have heard that modern drives might not play well with early generation SATA controllers.

I've had similar happen when using an SSD on a Socket 7 and a Promise controller. Some low end drives will work fine, but there will be ones that won't, and the obvious thing that occurs to me is that a company making a low cost SSD is likely to cut corners on making sure their drive is backwards compatible with ATA133 (or slower) as such applications must be an insignificant percentage of their sales. I haven't run into this issue with any Samsung, Kingston, or Crucial drives.

I only buy name brand SSDs (Crucial and Samsung mostly), and have never experienced this personally. However, I haven't ever tried them in early VIA SATA boards either, so I cannot confirm. Silicon Image controllers seem to work pretty well, from my experience.

I've been finding LGA 2011 boards like this DX79SR in a thermal take case

If it wasn't for the Windows 11 system requirements, they'd probably still be in use somewhere.

douglar wrote on 2024-12-26, 22:35:

I've been finding LGA 2011 boards like this DX79SR in a thermal take case

If it wasn't for the Windows 11 system requirements, they'd probably still be in use somewhere.

The attachment Photo Dec 26 2024, 5 02 18 PM.jpg is no longer available

If Microsoft doesn't change their policy regarding updates on Windows 10 or upgrades to 11 on older systems there is going to be an absolutely disgusting amount of pre-2018 computers being thrown away over the next 12 months.

I know plenty of people rocking Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge and especially Haswell systems on Windows 10 and 11 with absolutely no performance or stability problems. There are very likely thousands or even tens of thousands of people buying these computers second-hand (hopefully with Windows 11 installed) every couple months, even now, because they can get them cheaply and they are more than fast enough for everyday tasks.

... but with the ridiculously volatile and scam-laden state of the internet these days, running without proper security updates will rightfully scare a lot of people into upgrading.

It's going to be an e-waste nightmare, for sure. And it is absolutely unnecessary.

Very sad.

The notices they are sending out are sounding ominous, "back up your files now!" like they are gonna disable Win 10, not just cut off updates.