Intriguing, do you have sources for this ?
Selling old hard drives is one thing, but selling them at their decade-old price, is that illegal ?
I now that the USA likes the “buyer beware” concept, but there must be protections in place for consumers who do not know anything about hard drives ?
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No idea, I’m afraid, I’m just a basic-level user, no l33t mod powers.
Small flash drives are actually pretty handy for system admins… can copy boot images to them for unattended installs. You can do these with bigger thumb drives too, but then you’re wasting mountains of storage because the boot images are usually only a few megs big.
Last time I saw the bank of 32MB flash drives at target, I bought half a dozen of them because they’re kind of hard to find anymore.
But isn’t there something fascinating about the idea that this isn’t so much the result of corporate avarice as just that somewhere there are vast Indiana Jones warehouses of stuff and occasionally something that’s been logjammed gets unstuck?
In the 1970s I lived in Columbus Ohio, where the Army had their vast Defense Supply Center Columbus (DSCC) - Defense Logistics Agency, which was this giant complex of warehouses behind chainlink fence. We just called it The Depot when we were kids.
And probably, it was full of toilet paper and all kinds of stuff like that you need to keep an Army going. But there were these doubtlessly apocryphal urban rumors that, somewhere in that vast maze of warehouses, there were Ford Model T cars STILL IN THEIR CRATES, simply because — they’d been purchased, they’d never been needed, and now they were forgotten in the bowels of these buildings.
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Target’s systems may be improving. The other day I picked up a 8 GB thumb drive on sale there for cheaper than the same unit could be found at Amazon (thanks to Amazon’s price check app). I haven’t shopped in a WalMart in this century, but I remember that back in the 90’s they couldn’t keep up with the rapidly falling prices of RAM, and would often be stuck with inadequate and overpriced inventory. I just wouldn’t expect to see it still there today.
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In the dystopian future of “Software as a service” and “Cloud solutions” unopened copies of pre-cloud versions will join gold, cocaine, and $100 bills as the valuable commodities of the underground. We’ve already seen the beginnings of this with the rush to get CS6, the last version before ‘The Creative Cloud’ descends.
The unpersons of the electronic marketplace, without credit cards or trying to stay ahead of the panopticon, will sift through pre-collapse warehouses looking for software like that.
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Yes, though someone did go to the trouble of marking this down to the (ostensible) “Clearance” price.
That does lend greater credence to the ‘fleecing the suckers’ theory advanced elsewhere on the thread. Though, it could also be somebody mindlessly applying some ‘if shelf time is greater than X days, mark down by Y percent’ algorithm better tuned for something that doesn’t depreciate faster than unrefrigerated seafood.
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There is a store near my house that has boxed copies of games sitting on the shelf that come on 5 1/4" floppies and require a 386. They’re still $60. It’s a local game store though, and the management is notorious for being utterly clueless about inventory management. They also have a joystick that comes with its own ISA card for connectivity, still listed at $250.
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I would like to see pictures of that. Can you take pictures and post it here?
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I’ll try to remember next time I’m down at the store, I don’t get to go very often these days on account of kids though.
I have a 32MB compact flash card on my desk right now. Every now and again I sit and stare at it and try to comprehend it.
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I have the USB drive pictured. I bought it from the local Radio Shack (rebranded as The Source in Canada) for $14.95 in the bargain bin. When I got it home, I connected it up and found it had a video from a local school of a presentation including kids of one of my coworkers. I showed him and deleted it. He decided not to tell his wife, since it would infuriate her. Anyway, my point is that The Source repackages used items as new (in store) and resells them.
Some computers may still be useful, but lack the circuitry to use modern peripherals and accessories. One example that comes to mind is an embroidery machine. Sewing machines often come with “head warrantee” of twenty five years-- very durable compared to most computers. Now, the electrical, mechanical, and electronic components may fail without recourse after five or ten years, but still, at some point, the guts are likely to be “laughably obsolete, but still functional.”
I recently had to re-install my computer at work and could not find a usb stick to borrow. So I thought I’ll just pop out and find a cheap one in a nearby shop (in Central London). The cheapest option I could find was 1GB stick for £25. Needless to say I did not buy it.
There is one legit use for a smaller drive I could think of: If you had a Windows 95 or so PC and needed eternal storage you might need a drive that’s less than 500GB or so in size because FAT16 can’t grok it.
'Course the PC would still have to grok USB storage so so much for my theory.
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With 30 years of hard drive experience, some it spent in data archeology, I’m a reference; or you could Google “hard drive shelf life” and get a few million more.
Although not applicable to the empty Walmart drives, there’s also the shelf-life issue of digital rot. Gradually cosmic rays (along with other low probability events) hit the disk and alter bits. If the disk was in use the OS would correct this via checksums, RAID and so on but sitting on a shelf means that (low probability X long time) means the bad bits pile up until they can’t be repaired.
It all depends on the vintage of disk too. The early drives were sufficiently over-engineered and sufficiently low-density that they’d last forever. The old reader heads were so weak that you had to magnetise the hell out of a spot on the disk to reliably get it read. I’d bet on a 512 MB drive over a 20 GB any day despite the latter’s greater age. As density goes up incidents wipe out more data. With modern 3 TB drives I’d think that a stray proton could wipe out a whole movie or something. On an old 1.2 MB floppy you’d need to zap it with a medical X-ray machine to do the same damage. I get the impression that the error-guard technology built into these things is just catching up with the increased risk. The reliability vs. vintage graph is sort of an upward trending sine wave with a big amplitude.
I knew someone who did a huge survey of digital archival storage for a pacemaker company. Every pacemaker comes with a lifetime guarantee so you need to keep the manufacturing data for decades. Magneto-Optical (MO) cartridges were the only media found adequate but then that’s a technology that’s almost been pushed out of the marketplace so where are you going to get readers and what’s their shelf life? Let’s not even get into the ever changing Tower of Babel of file formats either. They eventually went with printouts on archival quality paper and an easily OCR’ed font, and stored them in an abandoned salt mine.
uhhhh, couldn’t you store digital data on punch cards made of archival quality card?
