[conspire] Time flies

[Rick Moen]

So, there I was, sorting through my couple of dozen old hard drives that
were now findable, now that I've mucked out the garage.  And such
treasures they were!  E.g.:

Conner IDE, 162 MB
WDC IDE, 170 MB

Hey, I was able to figure out without thinking about it, that those
should achieve their best and highest purpose as landfill.  But I had a
momentary brain glitch when I was sorting the greater number of SCSI
hard drives into 50-pin SCSI-2, 68-pin, and 80-pin (SCA) categories:

"Honey, what do you think?  Are a pair of slightly oversized Maxtor
340MB SCSI drives worth keeping?"  The answer, of course, is _no_.  
There's no conceivable reason to keep those, unless you really need a
brick-shaped doorstop.

I finally threw out everything below 1 GB, which cut the number of
drives roughly in half, and am busy torture-testing those that remain 
using "badblocks -vw /dev/sd?".

But I still feel just a _little_ silly doing it.  Every once in a while,
you really have to look at what's available new, and decide the old
stuff just isn't worth bothering with, any more.  E.g., Central Computer
will sell you an _80GB_ PATA (regular IDE) drive for about $70, and a
SATA one for about $10 more.  

So, puttering around testing old 1 GB and 2.1 GB drives is just a tad 
ridiculous.