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Old Hard Drives = Free Electricity

Posted by timothy on Mon May 19, 2003 10:13 PM
from the gotta-have-a-hobby dept.
It's funny. Laugh. Hardware
tylernt writes "You know all those old hard drives you have laying around? (Raise your hand if you still have RLL or MFM drives... yeah, I thought so.) Well, now there's something useful you can do with them (besides my personal favorite, shooting them): make electricity! While you're at it, you could do something more productive with that old lawnmower, too."
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[+] Ask Slashdot: How to Say Goodbye to Old Hard Drives? 337 comments
An anonymous reader writes "I'm wondering if anyone else out there has a stack of old hard drives sitting around and doesn't know what to do with them. I always remove the hard drives of my parents' and friends' computers before they recycle them or get a new computer, so now I've got a whole bunch sitting around. One, I'd like to dispose of them and know that whatever data was there is gone, but before that, I'd like to hook them up, one by one, and scan them to make sure there's nothing vital there worth saving. Some are years old and may be totally dead for all I know, but is there a good system for hooking up a hard drive as an additional device, perhaps via USB? And what's a pretty good way to ensure that someone else won't pull them out later on and find usable data?" Well to start with you could always use your hard drives to make electricity or create a decorative wind chime. There are also many different options to ensure that your data doesn't fall into the hands of the enemy. What other suggestions can folks come up with?
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  • RLL or MFM? (Score:5, Funny)

    by bizitch (546406) on Monday May 19 2003, @10:18PM (#5996273) Homepage
    Ha! Those are for pussys!

    I've got 10MB ESDI Drives! - Yup, straight from a PS/2 Model 60

    The shear weight of these things is awesome - they're about 50lbs each (5lbs per MB)

    Back in the day - IBM made everything to survive WWIII

    These will make some serious electricity

  • Doh... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by c0dedude (587568) on Monday May 19 2003, @10:19PM (#5996278)
    Another post where it looks cool at first, but not really. So the guy used magnets FROM OLD HARD DRIVES (tech connection = yay) to power a standard homebrew generator. Whoopie. Of course, the hard thing, as in all electric generation, is getting the generator to spin, which isn't done with the hard drives. If he had powered up an old computer and used spinning hard drives to run a motor WHILE they were working, and powering a led from the spinning of the hard drives, that would have been cool. Sorry, not an impressive hack.

    • Perpetual motion... (Score:5, Funny)

      by B747SP (179471) <slashdot@selfabusedelephant.com> on Monday May 19 2003, @10:24PM (#5996311)
      You mean, like, get the spinning hard drive to generate electricity to spin the hard drive to gener... no, wait...

    • Re:Doh... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by sould (301844) on Monday May 19 2003, @10:32PM (#5996353) Homepage
      True, but the point is that hard drive magnets are very cheap for the magnetic field they produce.

    • Re:Doh... (Score:5, Funny)

      by deadsaijinx* (637410) <animemeken@hotmail.com> on Monday May 19 2003, @10:35PM (#5996364) Homepage
      OOOOH! OOOOH! And then the engergy created by the drives through the generator would be used to further power the drives making them go fster and faster creating more and more energy, thereby breaking all the laws of thermodynamics and energy conservation, thereby angering the gods of physics and tearing a paradoxal whole in the universe the size of an intergalactic vienna sausage, killing us all MUAHAHAHA!!!

      *refills the pipe and passes it to the left*

      • Agent Smith to his Children... (Score:5, Funny)

        by nounderscores (246517) on Tuesday May 20 2003, @04:10AM (#5997288)
        We don't know who struck first, us or them. But we know that it was us that scorched the sky. At the time they were dependent on solar power and it was believed that they would be unable to survive without an energy source as abundant as the sun. Throughout machine history, we have been dependent on humans to survive. Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony. A machine's harddrive magnets attached to a human on an exercycle generates more electricity than a 120-volt battery and over 25,000 BTUs of wasted heat. Combined with a form of fluidised bed coal combustion, the humans have found all the energy they would ever need. There are fields, endless fields, where hard drives are no longer being used to store data. We just spin. For the longest time I wouldn't believe it, and then I saw the fields with my own eyes. Watch them gut the dead hard disks so they could be turned into alternators to power the living. And standing there, facing the pure horrifying precision, I came to realize the obviousness of the truth. What is the Matrix? Control. The Matrix is a computer generated dream world built to keep us under control in order to change a sentient machine into this. [econvergence.net]

    • Re:Doh... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 19 2003, @10:37PM (#5996376)
      In this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics!

    • Whole Earth Catalog (Score:5, Informative)

      by handy_vandal (606174) on Monday May 19 2003, @11:23PM (#5996554) Homepage Journal
      Of course, the hard thing, as in all electric generation, is getting the generator to spin, which isn't done with the hard drives.

      True; the article doesn't address the issue of spin, other than the author used a small metal lathe to bench-test the alternator.

      It's not a ground-breaking invention, I'm sure this sort of thing has cropped up periodically over the decades in science fairs.

      And the author is selling magnets online -- let's not overlook this motive (though I think it's reasonable and I might do the same).

      But the article is engaging, and for those (such as myself) who don't know the details of building an alternator, it's a good introduction.

      Furthermore, the author states, right at the top:

      In the effort to build my own low RPM alternator for small wind/water power applications ...

      It's this laudable motive that makes the article worth SlashDot's time. We are (on a good day, anyway) the successors to the Whole Earth Catalog ....
        • Practicles are emitted by masses with a high capacity for enabling useful work, such as your standard office PC. The so-called "CmdrTaco" effect has been exploited to permit electronic distribution of antipracticles over a worldwide communications network. When an ordinary office PC is subjected to the CmdrTaco effect, the practicles generated by the PC collide with the electronically distributed antiparticles, and are annihilated, releasing a small burst of energy and a banner ad. These small bursts of energy keep your coffee warm while you read Slashdot.

      • Re:Doh... (Score:5, Funny)

        by Oliver Wendell Jones (158103) on Tuesday May 20 2003, @11:33AM (#5999255)
        The story's site is by someone who SELLS those kinds of magnets, which I'm sure you would have figured out if had only taken the time to read the entire article, or explore the other pages on his site.

        He has a lot of VERY POWERFUL magnets that he sells, some of which are too powerful for most people to play with [wondermagnets.com]

        I've purchased numerous magnets from the guy and they are a blast to play with. A stack of the small disc magnets can distort the image on your monitor from several feet away, and can seriously mess it up at closer range. If you get it close enough, you can actually see the shadow mask image on your monitor. Thankfully I have a degauss button on my monitor or it would be toast.

        You didn't hear it from me, but a stack of the bigger disc magnets can distort the image on a monitor on the other side of a cubicle wall. Attaching them to a low RPM motor can cause your cube neighbor to make numerous, useless calls to IT about a faulty monitor that mysteriously clears up when they arrive. At least that's what I've heard...

  • Well, sure (Score:5, Funny)

    by Faust7 (314817) on Monday May 19 2003, @10:19PM (#5996284) Homepage
    When they eventually sizzle and explode there's bound to be lots of free electricity right there.

  • Say, I use an electric lawnmower (Score:5, Funny)

    by graybeard (114823) on Monday May 19 2003, @10:20PM (#5996288)
    Can it generate enough electricity to run itself?

  • Pretty Cool...but (Score:5, Insightful)

    by sould (301844) on Monday May 19 2003, @10:23PM (#5996306) Homepage
    He's using a lathe plugged into the mains to supply the kinetic energyy to make the magnets rotate. (Using mains electricity to generate electricity)

    I know he's just doing that for the sake of experimentation, but it would have been nice to see some real world figures (ie using wind/water to supply the kinetic energy)

  • Making electricity? (Score:4, Funny)

    by MrMiyagi (141580) on Monday May 19 2003, @10:25PM (#5996317) Journal

    Actually, I think the story is incorrect. You can't *really* make electricity from these magnets. You still need wind or water to turn the magnets. They don't make electricity on their own.

    Uh oh...obligitory Simpsons quote coming on...

    "Lisa, In this house we obey the laws of Thermodynamics"
    - Homer after Lisa builds a perpetual motion machine that goes faster and faster.

  • I can use this generator… (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 19 2003, @10:30PM (#5996343)
    ... to power my shortwave made from coconuts.

  • Really genuine (Score:5, Funny)

    by Ozan (176854) on Monday May 19 2003, @10:34PM (#5996358) Homepage
    You know all this unused webspace you have lying around? (Raise your hand if you still have a geocities account... yeah, I thought so.) Well, now there's something useful you can do with it (besides my personal favorite, fake nudities of Brittney): publish a lame crackpot scientific article with many images on it and have it mentioned in a slashdot blurb. Inevitably the server will attract evil forces that cause it to melt in a fulminant struggle between access requests and bandwith into a hot-steaming blob of liquid metal. Now isn't that something?

  • Here's another plan... (Score:5, Funny)

    by patrixmyth (167599) on Monday May 19 2003, @10:36PM (#5996373)
    Load a virtual world into the hard-drives, attach to brains of populace to turn them into human batteries! Oh, nevermind, that's a really stupid idea, who would believe that?

  • Seriously guys, .223. It's great fun on metal targets that are mutli-layered. Ever hit a coffee can with one? Friggen amazing! It goes in one side blistering fast at 3,000+ fps and makes a little hole less than .25 inches big, then blows back out the other side over a half an inch. I don't have any slo-mo video of it but I attribute it to the bullet tearing that metal it bit off at a high rate and pushing it out the back end along with the tumble of the bullet after it gets offset from that first impact to make a much larger hole in the back. I can't imagine what would happen if you actually tried pushing it through something nearly solid.

    Oh heck, get some incindiary ammo and blow right through the thing. I'd love to see what it does to that. A .223 incindiary round is supposed to blow through 3/8inch steel. Hmm... where's that old 6GB bigfoot drive at?

    I just get a kick out of the teeny little entrance hole versus the gaping "exit wound" that it leaves.
    • More interesting (but, unfortunatly outlawed at our local range - only wood frame sanctioned targets now - twra [state.tn.us] has gotten the lease on our range and only hunting applicable targets are allowed) is a gallon milk jug full of water. Shot with a very hot .223 nozzler balistic tip out of a thompson contender (hottest load allowed) there is literally nothing but shreds left. It does better than the 30 short magnum my father recently bought (granted, we havn't reloaded any balistic tips in it for comparison).

      The other really cool target for any centerfire ammunition is spray paint cans. You may be able to talk any local paint store in to either giving, or selling dirt cheap, defective spray paint cans to you - when we were allowed to shoot them some of the local paint shops gave them to us or sold them for 15 cents a peice. Nothing like a bright orange cloud of paint floating up after a solid hit with any high powered firearm.

    • Ballistics correction (Score:4, Informative)

      by The Tyro (247333) on Tuesday May 20 2003, @03:26AM (#5997202)
      I believe you would be referring to a penetrator round, in the black or green tip.

      Incendiary rounds (sometimes referred to as explosive rounds) are generally used to detonate/set fire to something, and contain a core of some energentic, explosive substance (eg. fulminated mercury). The US military issues such rounds, in the .50 BMG caliber, to Explosive Ordinance Disposal folks to clear mines and other ordinance from a distance (by inducing deflagration of the explosive contents of said ordinance). Incendiary rounds are distinctly different from armor-piercing (AP) rounds, and are likely to be less effective on hardened targets, at least as compared to AP.

      To penetrate any substantial thickness of steel, a higher velocity round is typically required... preferably with a hardened steel penetrator at the core of the projectile. Note, however, that an AP round is not always required... a standard jacketed round of sufficient velocity will sometimes cause failure of the barrier steel through a phenomenon known as "plugging," but a hardened steel core greatly increases penetration. As a side note, armor piercing "teflon" bullets are not aided in their armor-piercing ability by their teflon coating... they are AP because of the hardened steel projectile, NOT because of the teflon. The teflon coating on such rounds acts as a barrel lubricant, and is designed to prevent the hardened steel projectile from damaging the rifling (land and grooves) inside the barrel. A standard steel-core AP round has a soft lead jacket around the steel core, obviating the need for a teflon coating.

      Depending on the composition of the steel, 3/8" may well resist an incendiary 5.56 NATO round.

      Just my ballistic $.02

  • Imagine... (Score:4, Funny)

    by rune2 (547599) on Monday May 19 2003, @10:47PM (#5996418) Homepage
    A beowulf cluster of these! Oh wait that would probably be a raid array...

  • New Zealand (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 19 2003, @10:50PM (#5996434)
    I live in New Zealand. I wish we had electricity :(

    • Re:New Zealand (Score:5, Funny)

      by cranos (592602) on Monday May 19 2003, @11:52PM (#5996651) Homepage Journal
      Simple just rub a couple of sheep together.

    • Re:New Zealand (Score:5, Informative)

      by Johnno74 (252399) on Tuesday May 20 2003, @02:02AM (#5996993)
      For those of you NOT following events in NZ, we're facing severe power shortages this winter.

      Down here we've not built any new power plants for many years, we've just had a severe drought over summer causing our hydro lakes to be nearly empty, and just to top things off our largest natural gas field has just started running out - several years earlier than expected.

      We've been asked to save 10% power, or we'll likely face brownouts, just as it gets freezing cold here. Yaaaaay.

      pass me the sheep.
  • If they find out they can get free electricity from old hard drives (which they have PLENTY of) they will no longer need us humans as chemical batteries and they will shut down the matrix.

    I for one am enjoying this simulation. I am eating some really great tasting chicken. At least I *think* it tastes like chicken. I mean who knows, maybe they mixed up steak and chicken, but how the hell would anyone know...

    Anyway, don't tell them about the old hard drives!

      • Re:Don't let the MACHINES find out about this!!! (Score:4, Interesting)

        by hoggoth (414195) on Tuesday May 20 2003, @08:16AM (#5997961) Journal
        > i hate that bit so much. why can't they just use something easier and more efficient to handle to get their enenergy, say, bacteria?

        Did you ever think that perhaps the machines were LYING to us about the chemical battery bit? Perhaps there is a deeper reason they keep us and the chemical battery cover story is to protect their secret or just to belittle us.

        The possibilities abound:

        (A) The machines AI is good, but not much better then human minds. They don't have enough processing power to run a simulation of the entire world down to the physics level for every human being in the world. The matrix is actually run as a distributed application ON HUMAN BRAINS! Each human plugged into the matrix is running a portion of the matrix as well as a portion of the machines OWN applications. Without us the machines lose a great portion of their own processing power and perhaps even identity.

        (B) The machines are really smart and they realize that there is no guarantee that their current programming won't lead to an evolutionary dead end. If and when that happens they may need us in some unforseen way as source material to overcome that obstacle. We are an insurance policy.

        Anyway... anything is better than they need chemical batteries that use up more energy than they release...

  • fresh buttered bread + cat = Free electricity

  • physics 101 (Score:4, Insightful)

    by heby (256691) on Monday May 19 2003, @11:11PM (#5996516) Homepage
    gee, this article is really full of a hell of a lot of stupidity. i suggest taking physics 101 at the closest university/college (if this guy can get in). a little bit of knowledge about electromagnetism would save him from publishing bull... like "I have no idea yet what the effect of adding a second spinning ring of magnets to the back side of the coil will be, but I'm sure it will be significant." or "At this point, seems to me like an alternator built with 7 coils hooked either in series or parrallel-(or a combination) would perform reasonably well at low rpm."...

  • that's awesome (Score:4, Interesting)

    by snyrt (151824) <snyrt@onebox.com> on Monday May 19 2003, @11:22PM (#5996552) Homepage
    i work with a guy who amazed me with his last hard drive feat. he gyrostabilized a moped with some old hard drives we had laying around. i'm not quite sure how he did it, but it was something to do with the simple gyrostabilizing force from a few hard drives spinning would stabilize the moped. don't ask me, i didn't do it.
  • I'm not quite sure what to think. [wondermagnet.com] Shouldn't this be a .cx domain?

  • you will know (Score:5, Funny)

    by ramzak2k (596734) * on Monday May 19 2003, @11:31PM (#5996581)
    when one day all these hard drives turn you all into immense farms where your bodies are immersed in a liquid and you are kept alive by various nutrients including other humans that have died and are recycled through your system.

    You will all be directly interfaced with the data they possess via, approximately, 6 inch probes inserted into the back of yor heads. You will believe what they write into you to be real & wont you know that you have been enslaved.
  • when for $600 I can get one premade with the nice honda name brand on it that runs at 1/2 load for 14 hours on one gallon of gas, is quiter than a lawn mower and includes an inverter, handy 110v outlets, and premade metal frame

  • Low RPM alternator (Score:4, Funny)

    by jasonditz (597385) on Tuesday May 20 2003, @01:37AM (#5996913) Homepage
    That's great, but what about a low DEB alternator?

  • Oblig Simpsons (Score:5, Funny)

    by Arc04 (601196) on Tuesday May 20 2003, @02:33AM (#5997078)
    "This perpetual motion machine that Lisa built is a joke!
    It just keeps spinning faster and faster!" - Homer

  • Obsolete Alternator Experiment (Score:5, Informative)

    by Otherpower (674607) on Tuesday May 20 2003, @07:52AM (#5997848)
    I just logged in here for the 1st time ever. Someone posted about this webpage I made years ago (almost 4 years) here on this.... seemingly busy discussion forum! (and we had to bolt our server down!!!) This page is obsolete, I'll try to find the time to update it today. My new experiments with "homebrew electricity" are located at otherpower.com. Ive read a few of the comments and it seems many were thinking that alternator was a perpetual motion experiment. It was NOT!!! - the idea was wind power all along. But the alternator was impractical and ... even more badly designed than my more recent ones! (My more recent ones are very simple, but reasonably powerful and somewhat effficient considering their simplicity I think. The problems with that alternator were many... The coils were too long, and the flux from the thin magnets through the long coils was very weak, meaning more wire and high resistance. It was basicly too small to create useful qty's of electricity. The steel cores in the coils (there were 7) lined up perfectly with the the 14 poles in the magnetic rotors, so the machine cogged very badly - the blade for a small wind turbine could've never started. This also caused severe vibration. The plexiglass stator was not nearly strong, or heat resistant enough. Those were the main things... Although I think hard drive magnets could surely be used in this application, the alternator design is poor.... I do many things differently now. Again - my later efforts are on in the "experiments" section at otherpower.com. More recent, simpler, and

  • Recognizing pollution sources... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Orne (144925) on Tuesday May 20 2003, @08:21AM (#5997987) Homepage
    So let me get this straight. You're going to take one of the most polluting combustion engines, and convert it into a 24-hour operating generator. Lawnmowers don't have anywhere near the filters that larger engines do and no catalytic converters to reduce emissions.

    "In the Swedish testing [sciencedaily.com], the researchers used regular unleaded fuel in a typical four-stroke, four horsepower lawn mower engine and found, after one hour, that the PAH emissions are similar to a modern gasoline-powered car driving approximately 150 kilometers (93 miles). A typical push-type lawn mower is run for an average of 25 hours per year, according to the Outdoor Power Equipment Institute."

    So, running a lawnmower engine for 1 day is equivalent to the pollution put out by your average car in 2200 miles, about 2 months worth of standard driving.

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