The Hard Drive Deal

Sometimes just knowing something that others are not aware of ... or having the time to do something that others do not have the time to do ... Can earn you a little cash !!! Case in point: The Hard Drive Deal. While posting auctions on eBay, browsing other listings, and just doing my normal eBay thing I ran across these hard drives. 21 external hard drives ranging between 320GB - 2TB. The breakdown is as follows: 1 - 2TB, 2 - 320MB's, and 18 - 1TB hard drives. This totals over 20TB of hard drives. The 320's and 1 - 1TB hard drive were laptop drives, all of the others were 3.5" (standard desktop) hard drives. The "Buy Now" price was $369.95 with free shipping. After further reading however, I discovered that the hard drives did not show up under Windows "Computer" nor Windows Hard Drive Management program. Here is where you should turn the attention nob up a bit because it really gets unbelievably good here on out !!! Most of these were the one-touch backup type enclosures. None of them had power cords. I knew that in situations like this, 90% of the time the issue was a "physical" one, and simply removing the drive from the enclosure, initialize & reformat, and it should be as good as new. The "physical" issues could be: Broken USB port, broken wire, bad firmware card connection, etc...  A high definition wide screen movie of my experience with such drives and how I resolved the issues started to play in my mind. Then the strangest thing happened ... I decided to go on YouTube to see if there were any videos regarding the matter. I wanted to see if there were any dis-assembly precautions and maybe check to be sure my visions (LOL) were on point. Not only did I find a low quality, jittery, tilted, out of focus movie ... LOL ... The guy did exactly what I had planed on doing (my visions), and he was doing it with the same brand enclosure.

Here's the video below.

THIS WAS TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE

IT HAD TO BE AN OMEN !!!

Now a new movie started playing inside my head ... It was all numbers. I bounced back over to eBay to see what the average price for standard 3.5" 1TB Hard Drives were going for. I determined that the $70 - $75 range with shipping was a sweet spot. That is, it was a price that provided both me a good profit while at the same time providing the buyer with a bargain. I looked at the sellers other listings and saw that the seller had literally hundreds of these hard drives in their original enclosures and hundreds of good feed backs. I concluded that the seller was surely a "seasoned" seller that probably didn't have the time to do what I was going to do. "WOW!!! That's a lot of TB's", I said, as I pressed the "BUY NOW" button on eBay.

When the drives arrived I quickly unpacked them and began to disassemble them. The first thing to do was to thoroughly test them. I set the enclosures aside to be discarded because I didn't think they were sell-able. One of the 1TB hard drives was a laptop hard drive. I decided to keep that one for one of the Getac's (See Getac B300 post). There was also a 256GB SSD that was password protected that I had setting around collecting dust I planned to add to the pool of drives for sale. After testing, reinitializing, reformatting the drives (around 4 hours) there were three that had loud clicks and a fourth that made a grinding noise. These four were beyond help giving signs of needing a new PCB board at the very least. I couldn't put any more money into this project but I knew that there were others who would. Totally non-working hard drives will sell on eBay if they are large enough. Fortunately or unfortunately depending on how you look at it, the 2TB drive was one of the non-working hard drives, the other 3 were 1TB drives. Below and to the left are photos of the drives, enclosures, etc...

On quick assessment I thought that I could clear $1,000 on this deal.       SO LET'S GET STARTED :)


The next thing I did was sell the four non-working hard drives. Including shipping fees that I charged, I made $64.74. Currently the solid state drive has a bid of $74.99 (smiles). This hard drive deal is looking pretty good so far. Looks like I'll be getting over a third of my investment back in a snap and I still have a ton of hard drives to sell thanks to the addition of the SSD I had sitting around. By the way, I purchased that SSD for around $100 "AS IS" thinking a friend would allow me to borrow his desktop computer to repair it however, I never got the desktop. The solid state drive was password protected and I needed the desktop to remove the password. There may have been another way to do it that I was unaware of or unprepared to do ... So letting it go was a good choice as it had been sitting around for months. I will be giving a full report when the dust settles including shipping expenses. My shipping expenses are a tad high because I always go Priority flat rate. Can't really estimate what the net figure might be at this time but the plan is to list all of the 1 TB hard drives at $64.99 +$10.00 shipping. I might have to play with those numbers a bit but my feelings are very positive about this project for now.

About the only thing that I can say is: GOOD DEAL !!! STAY TUNED !!!

UPDATE 12/09/13 - SSD sold for 76.99 (Less $5.60 shipping expense). Funny that all of the busted drives sold and none of the working drives sold. I only had five of the working drives listed to test the waters. Now I know that I have to change something. Could be ad/text. It states that the drives were removed from damaged enclosures. Or it could be price structure, or it could be something else.  Resolution: Going to re-list for $5 more and FREE shipping ($70 total instead of $75) and remove the information stating that the drives were taken from busted enclosures. I'll also mention the fact that "ALL" of the drives have been re-initialized, re-formatted, and function as if they were new ... BACK TO THE TRENCHES !!! STAY TUNED !!!

UPDATE 01/03/14 - Still no sales and I've reduced them an additional $5 and listed them all in one auction for independent fixed price sales... sighs. Might have to start one or two super low to see where the bidding caps out at. Others are at my asking price and higher. Personally, I think it is the Christmas season that causes buyers to behave strangely. Most buyers around this time are either looking for new items, or returning/exchanging unwanted ones for example. I took a look at item sales for this item. Seems most have sold for around $50 - $55 dollars. So my asking price/opening bid is a little high. I can still meet my financial expectation if I lower the price an additional $10. I didn't want to start out too low and lose my shirt. This is taking longer than I expected and it may possibly be time to bail out soon, take what I can get, as long as it is profitable.

UPDATE 01/31/14 - Looks like I found the sweet spot. The drives are starting to move around $47.49 + $7.50 or around 54.99 including shipping. Should have them all sold February.

UPDATE 05/27/14 - Well the dust has finally settled. Seems like it took forever but luckily I have several projects going at the same time. I found that 2 more drives had problems or were dead. That took about another $100 off of the potential profit that I could make. The results are calculated in the spreadsheet below. I am considering continuing this project as an on going venture as a supplemental stream of income, but it's an area you have to keep on top of. The hard drive industry technology shifts at an amazingly fast pace. There are 6TB drives available as I write. Bigger, faster hard drives push down the prices of older, smaller hard drives.

As you can see I did not make quite as much as I thought I could, but close enough. I doubled my investment and I stll have a couple more drives to sell. Had I done things a little differently I probably could have come out with the same result in a more timely fashion. However it would have been at the risk of lesser profits.