EEVblog #927 - Jaycar Dumpster Sale

[EEVblog]

The annual Jaycar warehouse sale, take it for a buck or it goes in the dumpster!
UPDATE: Yes, all the hard drives work.

[TheSteve]

Shame the power supplies were gone, might have been a fun repair video there.

[Rerouter]

Those solar panels.... for a dollar a piece...

If anyone else knows where bulk partially failed panels are going for a song, i am all ears,

[Muttley Snickers]

Now you're just rubbing it in   , I collect those CCTV controller keyboards and on some the joystick assemblies alone are worth a packet particularly if they have a z axis for zoom.   

I've seen in the past similar clearance sales down here from other companies and instead of going directly to Ewaste some of it ends up at the local council recycle depots where people get another opportunity to buy it cheap and it also keeps a few people employed, some people frequent these places and buy up big and then sell it on at the weekend trash and treasure markets but it's generally buyer beware stuff, this is not a bad thing as there can be some bargains to be had but then nothings really a bargain unless you have a use for it.

[G7PSK]

For some reason here in the UK they would rather pay someone to take it away in a skip than sell it dirt cheap, most likely to do with the consumer reg's. Other times it is sold sealed bid on pallets making it pretty much trade only.

[cezar]

Deve, bear in mind those drives are probably sutveillance ones which means they are optimized for writes, may be lacking some power saving features and may not be good for reads (especially random access time). Those kind of drives have usually much longer MTBF but they don't like to be power on and off too often.

[cezar]

For some reason here in the UK they would rather pay someone to take it away in a skip than sell it dirt cheap, most likely to do with the consumer reg's. Other times it is sold sealed bid on pallets making it pretty much trade only.

Yeah... I was looking for similar sales in the UK with no success. I saw a quite few times some white vans guys, stack up with old Maplin stuff on various boot sales so there must be something going on

[Halcyon]

Deve, bear in mind those drives are probably sutveillance ones which means they are optimized for writes, may be lacking some power saving features and may not be good for reads (especially random access time). Those kind of drives have usually much longer MTBF but they don't like to be power on and off too often.

They also usually have little to no on-board error correction. A few bit errors when it comes to CCTV or other video usually doesn't matter. These types of drives are cheap which is why they are used a lot of those low-end Chinese CCTV systems (with bloody painful codecs which usually don't comply with any standards). They are also not recommended for use in RAID arrays.

I generally put these AV/Media type drives in the same category as "Green" drives.

[GabYoung92]

Haha reminds me of good old days of Jaycar - All the stuff there was typical dead on arrival products. 
Countless times I got asked by customers for those tall speaker boxes but all they could say was 'there is none left'. Wanted some myself! rage
Big eye opener to see how much of the exact same product gets returned to warehouse as dead...

FB9999 - This is a test code for the IT department to sell so that it didn't throw off figures at the end of the day.
G'day Anthony if you're somehow reading this!

[@rt]

Overall, I don’t think that was good publicity

[Magnets]

I'd make a Freenas/ZFS box with all of those, all off the shelf 2.5" NAS boxes are so expensive. Just get some of these things to really jam the drives in a regular PC case:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/121075264932
http://www.ebay.com/itm/390853038839
http://www.ebay.com/itm/272287743033

[Blastcap]

Even if they werent very good the tunrtables, i would have taken 6-10 of them.
Or at least a few of the cartridges. 

[ericloewe]

I'd make a Freenas/ZFS box with all of those, all off the shelf 2.5" NAS boxes are so expensive. Just get some of these things to really jam the drives in a regular PC case:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/121075264932
http://www.ebay.com/itm/390853038839
http://www.ebay.com/itm/272287743033

+1 for FreeNAS.

In a shameless act of self-serving promotion, I'll link in a guide to testing hard drives from the FreeNAS forums. It's written for new ones, but the same goes for old dodgy ones:

https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/how-to-hard-drive-burn-in-testing.21451/

Easier, but less thorough script:

https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?resources/solnet-array-test.1/

Don't believe what people say on Reddit, we're actually a friendly bunch.

The drives themselves should work fine in a server environment - them being surveillance drives doesn't make them any worse, unlike some have suggested.

[Kjelt]

$7 paid by mastercard there goes their profit 
Now will someone share an equal site from Keysight ?

[edy]

Very cool video Dave, and nice score! Too bad they don't have too many of these sales around here, or at least I never get to hear about them. There is a definite urge to go to one and hard to resist my hoarder instinct.

As you did, I'd just harvest the good bits.... but then what to do with all the junk that's left over? You still have to now dump the case, boards, cables and everything else that you can't really use. It's worth it though given how cheap it all was. I would find it hard to resist bringing more stuff home.... And then the wife will kill me. 

    What bothers me to no end is my recent visit to BESTBUY.... and sometimes STAPLES. They have this area at the front of the store for recycling... where people bring their own e-Waste to recycle. Last time I was at BESTBUY they had a stack of stereos, laptops, phones, and I don't what else. That is like teasing an alcoholic with a bottle of vodka....   

I wanted so badly to see if I could "dumpster dive" into that area, as I was almost certain it wasn't complete garbage. It's just as you walk into the store. But I realize that it is stealing if you take it, just as much as curbside-grabs (without asking the home owner who dumped it) can also be an issue. Still, I know there are trucks going around the neighborhood on garbage days and loading up stuff.... Especially the more affluent areas of town, where people dump valuable stuff all the time.

BESTBUY and STAPLES are supposed to be giving this stuff to e-Recycling, but then again, how many of those minimum-wage paid kids in the store probably dive in there themselves as a fringe benefit of the working at the store? Are do they have a strict policy in place to not touch any of it? The e-Waste company also likely paid BestBuy or at least paid to install their e-Waster Recycling Box/Display in the front entrance, so they are looking to make some profit from whatever stuff they are scoring as well, in the used after-market or recycled materials. I'm sure they have a warehouse and staff that go through it all and decide where it should go to return the best profit as well.

Anyways, I'm in the Vaughan, Ontario (north of Toronto) area and so far I haven't heard of or been aware of any such warehouse sales or e-Waste recycling depots that let people go through and pick up stuff that they can re-purpose. I'm obviously not going to steal stuff from the recycle bins of BESTBUY and STAPLES, and I don't have or know of any e-Waste-rich dumpsters in my area. That's probably a good think... don't enable a hoarder...

The only thing that comes close are some surplus electronics stores, but they are fairly expensive or have old junk and obviously need to pay to keep the place open.  Still... It would be nice to know for example, if anyone has any old laptops that I can wipe them clean and give them to my local kids school as they are always looking to equip the classes (they are under 10 years old, grades 1-5 primary).

[tszaboo]

Probably there was enought UPS there to turn your house into an island operation... I would have loaded up all those in a heartbeat for 5 bucks.

[nctnico]

   What bothers me to no end is my recent visit to BESTBUY.... and sometimes STAPLES. They have this area at the front of the store for recycling... where people bring their own e-Waste to recycle. Last time I was at BESTBUY they had a stack of stereos, laptops, phones, and I don't what else. That is like teasing an alcoholic with a bottle of vodka....   

I wanted so badly to see if I could "dumpster dive" into that area, as I was almost certain it wasn't complete garbage.

You can always ask nicely and swear on the soles of your (unborn) kids you don't make a mess.

[Fungus]

Probably there was enought UPS there to turn your house into an island operation... I would have loaded up all those in a heartbeat for 5 bucks.

They were all 'faulty' but the batteries in them are worth money. Even as scrap you might make a profit on them at those prices.

[G7PSK]

The items to really go for would have been the inverter gen-sets. Make as many good ones as possible and then weigh the rest in.

[CJay]

The drives themselves should work fine in a server environment - them being surveillance drives doesn't make them any worse, unlike some have suggested.

If anything i'd expect them to be better than most 'end user' hard drives, my experience of them places them somewhere between the commodity ones and the server grade ones, not stellar performance but they run forever and a day.

[M4trix]

This is why I never forgave my parents for leaving Australia 40 years ago.   

[ericloewe]

The drives themselves should work fine in a server environment - them being surveillance drives doesn't make them any worse, unlike some have suggested.

If anything i'd expect them to be better than most 'end user' hard drives, my experience of them places them somewhere between the commodity ones and the server grade ones, not stellar performance but they run forever and a day.

The retail ones are mostly NAS drives with additional DVR-centric features in firmware, like ATA Stream, which drops writes instead of retrying (only if explicitly requested by the host, so they're generally safe to use).

The OEM drives shouldn't be too different, but they might need a tweak or two to their idle timers and TLER timeouts, depending on what defaults the Chinese DVR vendor (the thought of Chinese DVRs makes me want to throw up, but mostly due to experiences unrelated to them... mostly.) asked for.

[ericloewe]

The drives themselves should work fine in a server environment - them being surveillance drives doesn't make them any worse, unlike some have suggested.

If anything i'd expect them to be better than most 'end user' hard drives, my experience of them places them somewhere between the commodity ones and the server grade ones, not stellar performance but they run forever and a day.

Are the mechanical components different between different "colour" drives. As far as I have read the motor, platters and read/write head are identical. Just the firmware is different. Can someone confirm that?

At the very least, they're very similar. All the comparisons I've seen are from different batches and/or revisions, making direct comparisons harder.

NAS drives might possibly include an additional sensor to theoretically compensate for vibration in multi-drive environments... In practice, nobody has shown the existence of the sensor to be true (some have speculated they're just measuring variations in angular velocity) and neither has anyone shown NAS drives to be "better" than their non-NAS equivalents (WD Red vs Green/New Blue, for instance).

As for DVR drives specifically, I'm almost certain that NAS and DVR drives are only distinguished by their firmware and an extra 10 bucks slapped onto the sticker price.

[Towger]

Are the mechanical components different between different "colour" drives.

I believe they may have changed over years WD have colour coded their drives.
But the early Black drives are build using a heavy case, much like the drives of old. They feel like quality from their weight when you pick one up, I only assume better quality parts are also used internally.  The early Red drives were the same as the Black but with different firmware. The difference was to fail with a read/write error faster.  The idea is to drop the drive from an RAID array fast, rather than hang a server while it retries.

I am not sure if this still holds true for the current versions.

[Halcyon]

The drives themselves should work fine in a server environment - them being surveillance drives doesn't make them any worse, unlike some have suggested.

If anything i'd expect them to be better than most 'end user' hard drives, my experience of them places them somewhere between the commodity ones and the server grade ones, not stellar performance but they run forever and a day.

I wouldn't say they are any better than consumer-grade drives they are just "different". They are designed to use less power, generate less heat and operate reasonably silently in recording devices at the expense of read/write throughput. In things like PVRs and CCTV recorders, as I have already mentioned, data integrity is less important. Bit errors generally go unnoticed in those sorts of applications, so it's cheaper to manufacture these drives with little or no built-in error correction technology. If any of this stuff is not important to you, then yes, they might be a good, cheap alternative to some desktop hard disks.

What tends to happen with some of these "AV" drives is that it's been constantly fed a stream of video/audio data. If a write operation takes too long, it won't sit there retrying or attempting to correct the error, it'll just fail the write operation and carry on with the next command. More often than not, especially with CCTV video, some missing frames aren't even noticed. Can you imagine what would happen if this happens to some important data?

Of course every manufacturer have different sets of features and market their drives differently. I personally wouldn't be relying on these sorts of drives for anything critical and certainly not in a proper RAID array.