Does anyone else harvest the magnets and platters from old drives as a monument to selfhosting history?

I use the platters like this as my primary long term storage solution. It just saves so much space without the large enclosures. /s
- You joke but early 90s we had exactly this with magneto optical drives
- Ah yes. The famous write-only backup solution :D

Techno-shamanism! I made a dream-catcher made from some plates.
- I made a wind chime once that I really loved. Had to dirty the plates because they could catch the sun well enough to vaporize your retinas
- I made a DRAM catcher once.
- I heard they keep data corruption away.
- Oh wow!

This is cool, but honestly kind of a deranged question to ask.
- Does anybody else harvest the teeth of their victims and put them on a keychain?
  
  Or fashion bow ties from their testicles. . ?
- Fair, my home office is a monument to too much free time, a hoarding habit for ewaste, and a wife who works weekends and overnights.
- This is just a less gross version of "DAE store their piss in jars so they can commemorate their unitary secretions"?
  
  baffled glance...wot?
  
  Unhinged comment.

Thought it was just me. Used to have at least twice this many in my old office:
- That's rad, and you did an amazing job keeping them whole. Recently I have been wrapping them in cloth, then the kids form clay around them for various fridge and office magnets.
  
  That's a good idea. Yeah, the trick I discovered in getting them off the mounting bracket without the chrome plating peeling is to grab each end of the bracket with vice grips and/or pliers (after you unscrew it from the drive) and just bend it down and away from the magnet. They usually come off in one piece that way, too.
- Wow it looks like a light sweeper
- I was doing some blacksmithing in high school, mostly knifes.
  When reaching 800°C steel is not magnetic anymore, it's also a good temperature to start forging the steel. So I needed a atrong magnet to know when the steel was hot enough, I used what I have available: a hard drive magnet.
  It felt quite "mad-maxy" to disassemble a broken hard drive to use it as a tool to forge knifes

No but now I know what to do with my old hard drive that failed :)

That's a funny looking Stanley cup.

- Likewise

Dude's the Predator of the IT world
- Pretty sure that title is firmly held by mcafe, even now.

What

I don't have the space to hoard garbage.

No

I use them as coffee mats...
- I do that with save icons!
- The 3.5s make for excellent coasters lol
  
  How do you keep them from sticking onto cups

Yes. The magnets are ridiculously strong. Several hold screen in place on my heat exchanger, to keep leaves and lawn debris at bay.
Haven’t figured out a good use for the platters, but skeet shooting has crossed my mind.
- If you wind a 2 or 3 layer pancake coil the size of the platter out of 12 or 14AWG magnet wire and dump a couple kJ through it from a capacitor bank, the platter will launch into the air. Don't try it indoors unless you want a platter embedded in the ceiling.
  
  Zombie apocalypse DIY railgun

No, because I am worried the NSA may try to collate data from them. In fact, I zero-wipe, drill bit the drives in the platters and the PCB, and drop them off at e-waste for recycling.

Nope, but now I wish i did

I used to make clocks with the platters and give them to friends and family. Michael's used to sell inexpensive clock mechanisms that looked really cool against the platter background. I haven't seen them lately, but I'm sure someone sells them online.
- That's very cool, do you have a picture of them?

And here I thought I had a lot of hdd platter coaster's.
- I have like 15 over the past decade and now I realize I am an ant to OP

Holy crap. I don’t, but after seeing that I think I’ll need to start

I thought you made a custom thermos bottle at first
- Same.

Macabre.
Yet also (bitter-)sweet, those drives gave everything they had for you, it's only right to honor their memory & remember them.
I just open the drives & put them on shelves.

I have like 30 old hard drives laying around and have been thinking about doing a cool art installation with them for a while.
Maybe shatter the platters to create a spiky landscape and epoxy them in, or something like that.
Any ideas?
- As more of an artist than a techie for the most part — if you have your medium or at least part of it — the more interesting thing about art is what you have to say about it.
  As an example, if you want to draw a distinction and comparison between the age of discovery and the age of technology, you could use the hard drives as a canvas on which to paint a portrait of something like Robert Scott / Lawrence Oates, or Jacques Cousteau, or Armstrong and Aldrin etc.
  On that last one - if you could tie the size of the drive in comparison to the size of the code used in the moon landing that might also be interesting.
  Anyway, all that to say - art is a mix of medium and message
  
  Thanks for the artist view on things. :)
  I mostly want something pretty to look at but adding a message to it is an excellent idea.
- Their density makes them ring like a bell, if suspended by a wire through the center. Good wind chimes.
  
  Will have to try that, also a good way to one-up my neighbor with those CDs hanging outside. :)
- I use an old platter on my desk as a coaster.
  
  Already have a few of those, always a good party gag for the ones that know.
- If you have different types you could do an exploded view hardware showcase
  
  Yes, I've got quite a few types, good idea.

I will keep the magnets if I ever get into this in the future, but not the platters. I'll just safely destroy them and dispose of them.
So far I only had 3 laptops and no desktops. I had 0 HDD failures, since I only ever had 3 of them so far.
The oldest one is more than 17 years old 80GB 2.5" Fujitsu HDD.
- The magnets are fantastic for tool mounts since they’re so strong
- Back in the day, I'd go through HDDs faster than systems-always needed to add storage before I could replace the CPU. I didn't start disassembling them until they got up to the 500 _M_B range, but you'd often get 3 platters back then. OP must be harvesting from a whole workgroup - I've only got a 3cm stack and 7 drives waiting for the screwdriver.

That's funny, that's exactly the method I stored my cdRoms back in the day.

Magnets, yes. Great for the fridge!
- Just watch out for your fingers. Yeee-ouch.

Curious about the age of the oldest one
- I started collecting in probably 2007, so manufactured before that for sure.

I keep the magnets, but I shred the platters. 'cause magnets are cool.

I would take those and the adhesive rubber feet that you would get with switches and make coasters out of them to give away.
- I've done this for years and it works great.

In a distant post-apocalyptic future, the survivors will use hard drive platters as a currency.

My daughter's drawings are held on my fridge with old HDD magnets.

Platters make good coasters

Both of my autistic kids love magents. I will pull them from old drives, car/pc speakers, or anything else that has them.

... I didn't but I guess I could start?

I do that to my dead drives, but I’ve only had one fail that wasn’t an SSD. Moreso because the washers that separate the platters have a very satisfying ring to them that makes me keep them as a fidget toy.
I use the magnets to hold screws, it works great for that.
Unfortunately, SSDs have less interesting parts, so I just take them apart to destroy the chips after failure

Every time, without fail, though I haven't decided what I want to do with them yet.

A common public toilet till machine has a keyhole that looks like a coin slot. Turns out, HDD magnets are the perfect shape to fish out any coins mistakenly thrown in there.
- Public toilet till machines - we don't have that in the US. Can you show a example - potentially even fishing out some coins? Super curious!
  
  Here is a datasheet of one / photo. I don't have the video of me fishing coins, I probably deleted it because it was unwatchable (it's hard to fish coins while filming covertly!) but about 5 coins fit into the space behind the keyhole before they start being visible. The front panel is non-magnetic, unlike CZK coins, and the sound of fishing them out is very similar to throwing them in, so there is little suspicion unless you are at the wrong-gender toilet. Unfortunately, 10 CZK coins take effort to jam into the slot, so almost only coins up to 5 CZK ($0.25) get accidentally thrown in. Still, pays for my bus home.
  
  And the coins aren't magnetic

- Drill it

The older IDE drives with the 5.25" platters and smaller ones make great wind chimes. The laptop ones are a bit .ore fragile due to thinner material. Years ago, we used to do this with a few of them.

I used to collect AOL cds. I had a stack a few feet high. I was going to make some sort of artwork out of them.

No, but you do, and I like this ob-jay-dar

I use old platters to hang around our chicken houses. The idea is to distract hawks and eagles with the sparkle as they spin in the breeze... Probably doesn't work, but I like the shiny disks :)
- we do that around the veggie garden, but with aol cds.
  
  Yeah I started with CDs but found they deteriorate relatively quickly ... :)

There's some really fun chemistry in the rare-earth magnets - I used to buy them in bulk to enlarge my own IT-workshop collection, which was mostly broken down for Nd salts. Also, the magnets from iMac screens were also plentiful when HDD magnets got small (and then went extinct).

Nice : )

Challenge accepted. I'll post our collection tomorrow! I used some magnets to hold up a white board last week too. Hahaha
- The mad god thrown of victory!

Yes. Got to admit mine just isn't as big as yours, though.

I've been lucky enough to not have a drive die on me yet.

I'm much more interested in your kit in the background.
- That is a self-made soldering kit box I made when I was in college and had to haul it around a lot. I have actually been meeting to replace it with something more permanent now that I'm a grown up with my own house. I have an air flow soldering rig which doesn't really have a home, and I could have a much better use of space. I have my brocade ICX6610-24 next to that which I've been programming for way too long, and a whole bunch of 3D printer parts on top of that.
  
  That kit box would actually be perfect for my needs as this is a hobby I only visit occasionally or when needed. It would be great to have something I can easily store.

Now I am feeling sorry I did not...

I wish I got that many hard drives just so I could do this.

I use the old disks as costers

This man self-hosts

Back in the day I bought a fridge freezer combo, second hand, no handles. Used to be a built in model. As handles I used two magnets from full height drives, they were ludicrously strong and shaped like a little bit like a handle.
Full height drives were 3.25" high for those who are wondering.