What are the odds that even if he finds that thumb drive that it even still works? LOL buy it dumbass, let us all know how that works out for you.
Was it a thumb drive? I thought it was a hard drive. Might even still be attached to the motherboard in a desktop.
If it’s a traditional hard drive with moving parts the chances of it still working are zero. Data recovery maybe possible if the platters are still somewhat intact but I doubt he’d even find it to begin with.
It’ll likely be ruined either way. Municipal waste is a mix of solids and liquids that gets crushed, shoved, and tumbled around before being compacted down by heavy treads and buried in layers. Anything electronic is likely to be damaged in all that.
Very low. I think he dropped below the break-even point on this several years ago.
Thing is, the drive increases in value all the time.
Thing is, the drive data retention decreases over time
Yeah but theres no way of knowing if its viable or not at this point, so the only known factor is the value of BTC and the cost of money spent searching for the drive. Even if it fails break even (cost > value) that changes over time.
What are the chances the hard drive would still be readable, I wonder?
And keep backups, folks.
It depends how it was stored. If it is just raw dogging the garbage pile? The odds get very low but, theoretically, it is just a matter of very carefully the drive before booting it up. Think “data forensics”
If it was stored in a plastic bag or box? Then it is about as safe as a drive in your closet that you haven’t spun up in over a decade.
It gets compacted in the garbage truck and compacted some more at the landfill. I think the odds are slim it could be found in one piece
garbage truck compacting isn’t really that much, check out what it looks like when they dump it. lots of stuff doesn’t get exposed.
The drive would have been fed to the incinerator where I live. We don’t use a dump, we have a huge waste to power transfer station.
Compacting at a landfill however ….
Dumped out of the truck into probably another sorting area where machinery pushes through it potentially prying out large salvage pieces for scrap, or destructively breaking it apart by driving through and over it.
Over, and over, and over, and over.
Different landfills have different policies/procedures.
Like I said, the odds aren’t great. But if there was ever any chance of finding it, this isn’t the kind of system where things are getting cubed every step of the way. And once there is a layer or two of trash above it (making finding said drive nigh impossible), it is going to be pretty protected from even heavy duty constructicons driving over it.
