A Guide to Hard Drive Recycling

Two-day shipping and easy drop-off are rewards you will receive after you submit and receive your free hard drive and SSD. Once your hard drives and SSDs are sent off for recycling, you do not need to do anything extra. And because these devices can’t be reused, or returned to the manufacturer thanks to an encryption technology embedded into the disk, there is no risk of data loss from even just a minor physical injury. Your hard drives and SSD’s will be sent for safe disposal in just a few days, which is more convenient than bringing them into your own hands like that. 

The program is operated by Western Digital and consists of several steps: for your hard drives and SSD “just like new”, simply fill out the form using the links at the bottom of the page and your drive will be safely off your hands. The least amount of steps is asking a lot, but it’s worth asking yourself how much potential harm there is to be avoided in order to make sure your hard drives and SSDs are off your trees. To find out more about WD’s free and secure Solid State Drive recycling program, click here. If you’re interested in computing with the new features and speed offered by the next generation of SSDs, be sure to check out our guide on the best SSD’s.

Professional technicians will be able to process your items in person (with gloves on, of course!), but can even send items to you for free! With some caveats for taking your hard drives to that level, however: Your items have to be physically intact, contain no debris, and be free of any signs of damage. Additionally, it should be noted that items sent in will not be eligible for an instant recycling check. Of course, the small godspeed you have for helping throw these things away should be enough to convince you.

If you’re selling your old hard drives or otherwise making a business out of printing out hard drive recycling programs, this is another way to increase your click-through rates and save yourself a little money. Keep in mind that even if you are a part of one of these recycling programs (or know someone who is involved), you still have to meet the legal requirements of each individual recycling program you participate in. Since each organization has its own specific policies, I suggest checking the site of the organization you’re sending your stuff to.

While you should be able to recycle your hard drives and SSDs at home using the above methods, it’s a good idea to use one of the companies that make metering products to do this for you. PCMag has a guide you can follow to help you properly recycle your hard drives. Many companies also make remote controlled lidar that will accurately scan your drives and replaces them when they can’t be scanned anymore. There’s a learning curve with these products, but they come in handy for quickly scanning drives and, of course, recycling them.

If that isn’t enough work for you, there are also companies like Overdrive that make products that you can purchase to take care of all the hard drive and SSD recycling you need.

The hard drives you’re sending in are referred to as “recovered” drives and are anything from 2.5 inches to 5.5 inches depending on their capacity. HDDs are broken up into magnetic and mechanical parts along with loose space, and the smaller the drive, the more likely there will be mechanical parts that aren’t easily accessed. Therefore SSDs will typically be sent in at least 1.5 times their original capacity leaving plenty of room for other things. Most by maximum capacity.  There are several ways to send drives: Via the Amazon Simple Storage Unit program, which is very convenient the way it works, you get a small 200 watt USB 3.0 external drive that only takes up a few square inches and can be stored in a bag or backpack. Write on it! NAS’s, Cloud storage services, and even online game files could all mount inside!

For more on how to send your drives to the recycling center, check out the video below to see how it works.

Alternatively, using an online services like Amazon Smart Delivery will bring your storage devices straight to your door. I have friends who have had this service utilize their same email address on the hard drives to package multiple items into one single shipping package without at the bedroom level requiring that a third person be involved. Alternatively one can put on their FedEx receipt, with the hard drive and any other loose items attached, (not the shipping label), into their online shipping container and have the package delivered to them. According to Amazon it should arrive within 7 business days to most regions. At the time of writing, it’s possible to buy Amazon Smart Delivery membership, which works in much the same way except Amazon will ship additional items in an order.

Disposing of hard drives is only half the battle or so, as it’s probable we’ll need to constantly find new storage for our data ever since virtually everything we encounter that requires storage will eventually become accessible on the internet. The other half is finding a good place to place it. This idea of where the data should go may also be a bit more difficult, but thankfully a program called “Hard Drive Space Show” exists, which predicts where each hard disk and SSD is likely to go based on their physical location in a computer’s disk drive table and which might be hard to guess, as a number of drives in a RAID array cannot be accurately predicted with any degree of accuracy.