Disposing of old computers and tablets

[Dave Zellers]

Well now you've got me thinking which is always a problem.
Is a hard disc drive actually an analog device? It's a physical spinning device. But the storage is digital. Quasi analog? Digalog? What defines analog vs digital? A HDD seems to incorporate both.

And for the record, I couldn't spell 'incorporate' correctly.

Well, I did the second time.

As a notoriously bad speller, MAN I love spell Check. In it's honor, I do my best to try to learn the proper spelling every time.

But back to what defines digital vs analog? Is it blurry?

There is nothing wrong with stealing a dead thread.

[Lee DeRaud]

Is a hard disc drive actually an analog device?

At the platter/head level? Yes, definitely.

As a wise old EE told me early in my software career, "ALL electronics is analog. A big part of my job is letting people like you pretend it's digital."

[Jim Becker]

The data that's stored is digital in that it's just a bunch of "offs" and "ons" AKA, "ones and zeros" or "black and white". Analog data would be more like shades of grey...there's intensity/amplitude, etc. The physical spinning or moving device isn't material to that because it can theoretically store either digital or analog data. Recording tape and a spinning hard drive both use magnetic properties to store data. The former is "usually" analog (although not limited it it) and the latter is "usually" digital data but again, not limited to it. With computing, it's pretty much digital data no matter how it's being stored.

[Mike Henderson]

But back to what defines digital vs analog? Is it blurry?

Lee was correct in that it's all analog. The difference is how the signal is interpreted. In most cases for digital, if the signal is below some threshold, it's a zero. If above, it's a one.

If the signal is going to be used for analog, the actual value of the signal is passed along to the rest of the electronics. An example is a old time phonograph record. The voltage output from the cartridge varied depending on how far the needle moved. That voltage was then amplified and finally applied to a speaker and you heard music.

When music is digitized, the analog signal is sampled at some interval and a digital value is assigned to each sample. The problem is that the digital value is usually not exactly the value of the analog signal. The difference is known as quantization error. Having lots of digital values reduces quantization error, so sampling at 16 bits per sample is better than sampling at 8 bits per sample.

Mike

[Dave Zellers]

All very interesting!

[Curt Harms]

I took the hard drive out of our last computer and have it in an external hard drive case. I will do the same with the current one. It refuses to function well ever since I foolishly followed Microsofts prompts and put windows 11 on the windows 10 machine. It is nice to have nothing to hide and not a whole lot of great value to worry about. All of the family photos are my biggest concern.

Maurice, if you haven't done so, get a removable memory device e.g. flash drive, portable hard drive, whatever and copy those files that you will hate yourself if you lose to at least one external device. People smarter than me (not a high bar) recommend two copies, one kept off-site, like in a bank box or relative's house. Encrypt if you don't want anyone snooping.

[mike stenson]

At this point, I'd actually recommend cloud storage for backup for most people. This is actually what I do, so it's putting my money where my mouth is too.

All this talk of mechanical, spinning, drives is kind of fun. Don't discuss those much these days, they're deprecated and pretty much dead end tech. Unlike other dead tech that I still employ (optical media, records), I don't think they'll be coming back. Ultimately the form factor and power consumption of flash is superior.

[Maurice Mcmurry]

Maurice, if you haven't done so, get a removable memory device e.g. flash drive, portable hard drive, whatever and copy those files that you will hate yourself if you lose to at least one external device. People smarter than me (not a high bar) recommend two copies, one kept off-site, like in a bank box or relative's house. Encrypt if you don't want anyone snooping.

Thanks Curt! I have been creating Zip drives of themed photo albums and creating shared albums in Google photos so our archive exists in more than two digital places. Now to digitalize 3 generations of film photographs from 3 family trees. Thank goodness brother and sister married sister and brother... twice... so we have 4 marriages in 3 family's... legal in Missouri, Arkansas, and Utah.

[Lee DeRaud]

All this talk of mechanical, spinning, drives is kind of fun. Don't discuss those much these days, they're deprecated and pretty much dead end tech. Unlike other dead tech that I still employ (optical media, records), I don't think they'll be coming back. Ultimately the form factor and power consumption of flash is superior.

But still more cost-effective for multi-TB RAID servers, yes? Awhile back, I priced out replacing the Seagate IronWolf drives in my NAS with SSDs, and it was an impressively high number.

(quick google) I see that 8GB SSDs are now "only" 3X the price of their spinny relatives. Maybe in another two years...

[Dave Zellers]

But still more cost-effective for multi-TB RAID servers, yes? Awhile back, I priced out replacing the Seagate IronWolf drives in my NAS with SSDs, and it was an impressively high number.

(quick google) I see that 8GB SSDs are now "only" 3X the price of their spinny relatives. Maybe in another two years...

Probably longer. Like others, when a computer fails, I pull the hard drive and pop it into a cheap external case to be used as a backup. Also what is the expected lifespan of data on an SSD vs a HDD? I don't know, just asking.

And to MM- ZIP drive??? Isn't that from the last millennium? I used to own one but don't remember the time frame. At this point, you will be at the mercy of the reader. Do they still sell ZIP drives? I knew someone who made a retirement level fortune by investing in ZIP drives early on and cashing out at just the right time. Aaahh memories...

[Curt Harms]

Ah, Zip drives. They were used (still are if they still work I'll bet) to update aircraft Universal FMSs (Flight management System). It's only been a couple years since Universal ceased maintenance support for Zip drives. The upgrade to be able to use flash media in place of the Zip disks cost around $11,000 - yup 11 grand for a flash reader & installation.

[Jim Becker]

I had a ZIP drive. A LONG time ago! LOL Ah, the memories...as it were...

[Maurice Mcmurry]

I had a ZIP drive. A LONG time ago! LOL Ah, the memories...as it were...

I think I meant a flash drive. I am a true Luddite. We did not have a PC until 2010. The kids can not be in the same room with me if I am on the computer. I am starting to understand why.

[mike stenson]

But still more cost-effective for multi-TB RAID servers, yes? Awhile back, I priced out replacing the Seagate IronWolf drives in my NAS with SSDs, and it was an impressively high number.

(quick google) I see that 8GB SSDs are now "only" 3X the price of their spinny relatives. Maybe in another two years...

We don't market spinners anymore, but I work on enterprise class stuff.

[Lee DeRaud]

I had a ZIP drive. A LONG time ago! LOL Ah, the memories...as it were...

Heh. I recall using them for backup on my first GB-sized drive, in 1995 or so. The idea of storing my current photo collection on those would be insane: 100MB is only about 25-30 shots these days. Of course, they predated digital cameras by several years.

It's always fun when you find yourself on a technology transition point. My first digital camera was a Sony FD73...and yes, the 'FD' stands for 'floppy disc'. It had a built-in 1.4MB drive, which held 15-20 shots at a whopping 640x480 resolution. It's best feature was a huge (for the time) 10X optical zoom. (The model that replaced it still had the floppy drive, but because of increased resolution only held about 8-10 shots. But it could also use a "Memory Stick": little gum-stick-sized ur-SD cards in the 32MB-128MB range.)