Why do some people buy dead computer hard drives on eBay?

Answer 1

Just like the previous answer not all dead drives are actually dead, and may actually only need a relatively simple checkdisk to bring them back to functioning.

Another reason to buy even a dead drive is that unscrupulous individuals will attempt to recover data off the drive on the off-chance it could be used in some way (ie, user names, and passwords, SI numbers, that sort of thing).

Answer 2

A university did an experiment where they bought 250 used hard drives on eBay. They found the majority contained live data, and even those that had been erased had data that could be easily recovered. In the end they recovered data from 85% of the drives, some of which had been used in ATM machines. They were able to recover bank account numbers, pins, balances, private emails, documents, etc.

Answer 3

Not all hard drives are dead. Some people simply sell them when windows crashes and they don't know how to reinstall.

Others sell because the HD's heads rattle around and they think the HD will die. Others sell because the drive has some bad sectors and they think it's the beginning of the end.

Some simply buy them to take them apart and look inside, strip parts, rebuild other drives etc etc.

Oh the possibilities are endless ;)

Answer 4

To try to recover someone elses data in case they are not erased totally
Other reasons is they are engineers, need the parts to make another HDD work by swapping parts from identical drives

Answer 5

Some people think HDs are dead and they aren't. They probably fix them.