Lucky user finds 6TB of free SSD storage while dumpster diving — finder plans to use the six 1TB Samsung 850 Pro SSDs to download entire Steam library

There could be treasure in recoverable content. About fifteen years ago I purchased some CFs for photography and performed a scan before putting them to use and found a trove of hardcore swinger party porn in raw format - not pro photos - but honest attempts. Also included were photos of 18-20 year old invited girls holding up their driver's licenses (the tall kind for those under 21) in one hand and their social security cards in the other. So what? That was 15 years ago, think of what lives they're possibly living now, dreadfully afraid of being exposed!

Interesting, you might want to scan them and run checks if everything kosher. In the location where I am, people commit crimes and would throw things in the trash to avoid getting caught.

A deep wipe would be safer if you choose to keep the drives. I know someone got caught with CP and CSAM even if those drives were wiped. The authorities have a way to retrieve those deleted information.

I wish I could fit my whole steam library in 6TB.

Over 20 years, tons of humble bundles and summer sales I've racked up a library of ~ 3,500 games I feel like I'd need at least twice that number. Especially if I want any room for mods/workshop content. Ark can literally take up half a TB all on its own, and skyrim/fo4 + mods can also easily reach hundreds of gigs.

Good for them if the drives work, and aren't malware traps or were pitched for good reason.

But IMO enough risk for these to fall under "I can't afford cheap hardware".

xdaDeveloper2019 said:

"Lucky"? Six 1TB SSDs from 2014, undoubtedly from a server, have likely had more read/write sequences than there are grains of sand on a beach. There is a really good reason that they were in the trash.

While I'd agree that most people have good reasons to discard perfectly usable SSDs, that doesn't mean they are bad for other uses or users.

What sets SSDs apart from HDDs found in trash is that typically their ability to self-report on their usage or the abuse they have suffered is much better: SMART data and self-tests will quickly reveal their state.

Once NVMe drives reached and exceeded 2TB capacity I also had to choose what to do with my storage, SATA-SSDs had been a revolution after spinning rust, but were obviously becoming a bottleneck with a single NVMe doing much better than even a RAID0 with a bunch of SATA-SSDs.

But none of my 850's and 860's, Pro or Evo had even worn by more than 2-3%, so their obsolescence wasn't driven by wear, it was performance, and the overhead of RAIDing them for reliable primary storage wasn't attractive, either.

But since HDDs also increased in capacity to the point where running my persistent bulk storage via the usual 8-drive RAID6 close to the 10Gbit network throughput, resulted in capacity (and cost) beyond my needs, I decided to split the bulk storage tier into a narrower (and thus slower) RAID5 with just 4 (much bigger) HDDs and compensate the lesser bandwidth by pooling those SATA-SSDs into caches, e.g. one for a shared Steam library, others for warm VM images/snapshots, and LLM models.

These caches doesn't contain critical data (I make sure to maintain 3 distinct HDD based copies for that), but they offer enough convenience via speed for me to maintain them, while they don't cost extra money to buy. x4-8 2.5" SATA enclosures fitting into a single 5 1/4" HH drive bay are cheap, and so are M.2 6x SATA controllers for those very new systems, which don't even have SATA ports any more.

If you don't have those use cases, I guess disposing of them may be a logical choice, although so far I've always been able to find family and friends who were grateful to take SSDs off my hands: selling them is usually more trouble than giving them away for free.

And, of course, in the EU, we do separate our trash, and electronics won't just go into a general dumpster, ...at least not initially: not everything labelled 'recycling' lives up to its promises.

In many ways the reusability for the first generations of NVMe drives is much worse than for those SATA SSDs, because SATA controllers and even port multipliers are cheap, while PCIe lanes and switches cost easily more than those NVMe drives are worth for their capacity, but that's another topic.

1TB 850s... yes, the place for them is the dumpster bin as 4TB 870s don't cost a fortune nowadays.
Although data on them may prove to cost lots more, if recoverable.