Comment by paranoidrobot

For years I've been collecting a slowly growing pile of old drives from old devices as I had replaced them.

I finally decided to do something about them and got myself a USB to IDE/SATA adapter and spent a week or so duplicating them so I could check if there was anything worthwhile to keep, before destroyig and sending them to an e-waste recycler.

Some of those drives had been sitting around since early 2000.

All except two of the mechanical drives just fired up and worked fine. One won't power on at all. One powers up, but reading from some sectors just results in failures.

But the SSDs are another story. All blank/empty for any that were more than a few years old. Even though I know some were pulled from working machines.