Checking out a giant lot of 38 hard drives, will they work?!

This is the largest lot of drives I have ever bought since since I started growing my collection. 38 untested drives, 80€ (50€ for the drives, 30 for shipping, mind you each box was about 10kg)

A lot of the drives were newer ones that I don’t usually go for, but for about 2.1€ a piece… And there was also a few nice older drives in there as well, including a rare and very interesting Micropolis Mustang 4540A, which probably is the very last series of drives Micropolis made before they shutdown in the mid to late 90s.

Obviously being untested, there’s the risk that most of the drives will be dead, you know, ""untested"". So let’s find out if these work…

—— Spoilers for the results below! ——

The results really were incredible, out of 38 drives, 33 start up (two of them after a small PCB fix), two have bad PCB (one of which is confirmed to be a good HDA with no bad sectors and only 3 are completely dead!

Out of the 33 drives, only one has major issues, and a few more have minor ones like a few bads and/or reallocated sectors, but most of them were just happily working. Sadly, the one drive with major problems had to be the micropolis one, but considering how good the lot was, I really can’t complain. (Thanks, FAT16, for taking so little space that the file system fits between the bad sector patterns, in a similar way as that SCSI IBM with bad sector patterns I have)

Here is the place where I’ll tell something very important and maybe unexpected. I formatted all the drives and installed the OSes I demonstrated on them. However, I took a quick look at the newer drives before doing so, just to see when they were last used and stuff. On two of them, the 1TB hitachi and newer 500GB Seagate, I found recent files, as new as 2022, including identifying information and even bank details etc… I didn’t actually open the files but just saw from the file names and thumbnails. I was a bit shocked at how careless the people that used to own those drives were. My assumption is that those drives came out of computers that were thrown away that the seller grabbed out of some recycling place and pulled the drives out of them. If you guys ever want to throw a PC away you should honestly at least delete your files and preferably wipe the hard drive first.
It’s far from the first time I get drives with data in them, and it can be interesting to take a look at old programs on drives from the 90s, but finding actual recent data was a first (well I don’t usually buy drives as new as these were but anyways…)