by the way the answer is: 21 hard drives

@cwebber How many of them are IDE drives under 200 MB?

@ckeen Smallest one is 500MB

@cwebber That's a lot of data!

@cwebber Are you still in Chicago? Should I bring my drill over?

@pushcx Ha... unfortunately not! I'm in Madison, WI, and we're just about to move to Easthampton, MA! That's the whole reason I'm taking everything apart right now...

@cwebber how many are less that 4GB? I still have a 500mb drive I just cannot get rid of. It still works.

@timotheus Only one that's that small I think

@cwebber I had something similar a few years back. Bought a USB dock for hard drives and wiped them.

Now, I full-disk-encrypt every drive.

@liw Yeah, problem is that many of these are drives that failed, so I can't wipe them easily!

@cwebber If I had that problem, I'd dismantle the drives, too. I've been lucky enough to not to have had to.

@liw It's also for the older ones, I know many failed totally, and I don't remember which, so for a percentage of them I'm just taking all of those apart at once and destroying because my timeframe is limited.

@liw For the rest, I'll be starting up my old friend dd tonight

@mlemweb @cwebber these drives weren't as hard as they wanted us to think, eh?

@mlemweb @cwebber try a direct overhead photo where the platters fill the frame. It's gonna be a great wallpaper.

@qwazix @cwebber

I didn't think they came out as well, the lighting wasn't dispersed enough for my phone camera to do it justice and I already packed the DSLR

@mlemweb @cwebber I think that if you pack them together a bit more so less table is visible it's gonna be much better. Still though with a bit of cropping...

@mlemweb @cwebber 120 years later: after the great breakthrough of curing aging, now scientists can extract data from photos of hard disk platters, even those that have sustained damage.

@qwazix @mlemweb gonna take some real magic to extract that much high density information from as low density of a cell phone camera picture

@qwazix @mlemweb not to mention the other magic

@cwebber @mlemweb come on lemme dream :-)

I assume however the information of a 20mb 5.25" drive w/three platters might physically be able to fit in a 20mpix smartphone photo lossleasly compressed. The information density shouldn't be too much either.

@qwazix @cwebber

It does look better cropped and in black and white!

Here's another for you to play around with

@mlemweb @cwebber awesome!