35% of used hard drives are shredded in the US 35% of used hard drives are shredded in the US. If that alone could be recycled it would represent
1000 meric tons of Rare Earth Magnets per year alone! Other Hard drives are either sold into secondary markets or buried in the landfills..
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So were are these hard drives? Hmmmm lets see.
Google Data Centre
Amazone Data Center
NSA data centers
Any Cloud computing Data center...
FaceBook
Etc... Etc...
https://www.quora.com/What-happens-if-the-hard-drive-in-a-data-center-fails-which-has-my-Google-Drive-data-on-it
"What happens if the hard drive in a data center fails, which has my Google Drive data on it?
The short, short answer is that Google has quite a lot of redundancy, both for performance and reliability reasons. There isn’t a hard drive with your data on it. There are many. When a hard drive fails, Google takes great pains to dispose of it properly, so that nobody’s information gets exposed accidentally.
Their data centers are designed for continuous failure. Think about it: Even if a single hard drive has a MTBF of 1,000,000 hours, when you have 1,000,000 hard drives*, then on average you have one hard drive failing every hour. That’s 168 hard drives failing every week."
If you want to see more hard drive carnage, skip to about 3:30 in this video..
" Given the sheer number of hard drives Google goes through, you can be pretty sure they have a strategy to keep the data on their drives from getting lost with the drive, through redundancy and backups. And as you can see in both the videos above, they also have a strategy for disposing of the hard drives appropriately.
*1,000,000 is used here for illustrative purposes only. I don’t know if Google has ever publicly stated how many hard drives they have online at any given time. Their data centers are mind bogglingly huge based on publicly available information sources. The general argument is what matters.