zerowaste

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Discussing ways to reduce waste and build community!

Celebrate thrift as a virtue, talk about creative ways to make do, or show off how you reused something!

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Why it is worthwhile to dissect e-waste -- there are sometimes useful gems therein (slrpnk.net)

submitted 2 weeks ago by activistPnk@slrpnk.net to c/zerowaste@slrpnk.net

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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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[–] sudoMakeUser@sh.itjust.works 11 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] sobchak@programming.dev 5 points 2 weeks 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.