Went to a sale kind of like this in the states a while ago. Also ended up buying like 30 PVR's for a grand total of like $50. Each one of them had a 500GB hard drive inside, and a couple were a slightly different model (didn't really notice any discernible difference inside) with 1TB hard drives. Was such an awesome score.
Dave I can not believe that you did not take all those power supplies, they would have made a perfect giveaway. Only the real electronics nerds would applied, since they are faulty and need repair :)
lol yeah at least some ebayers clean them before selling, not like the majority of lowlifes that sell stuff all crusty and dirty for over average prices.
Going for the stuff with HDDs in it was a good call. Even 500GB ones have a resale value higher than a dollar, and even if you didn't wanna sell them, you can never really have too much external storage.
Dave, could you get Doug Ford back in the lab to take a look at that amp? Would be interesting to hear both of you discuss, shall we say, the limitations of its design.
I am a current Jaycar Electronics staff member and majority of all that would've been from the 100+ stores around aus as part of the company's stock return process. Every store has a PER (Past Economical repair) process in place so everything under $150 gets destroyed at store level everything else gets sent back to the warehouse to either get fixed and reissued back to the store as a refurbished item or as shown be sold to the public for spares. And yes i have sold many a life to customers.
I can recycle them myself if I can't fix them. But I would of taken some quad copters and some other stuff for 1$ a piece I could get 10-20 make some of them work and give them as present and recycle what is left. There is no EU rule that says this can't happen, but we also don't have any such big retailer that would have its own brand from china.
Man, I'd love to have gotten my hands on them hard drives! I'd have grabbed a few of the inverters and tried to got one or two good one's out to it. That BGA chip was hilarious... _Psst! Balls are showing!_
omg.. so glad I'm not down in AU.. I'd probably have grabbed 1-2K$ worth of stuff, and have to expand the house later. I'd probably have grabbed a dozen of the Xenon torches for the carrying cases alone.. not to mention a pallet full of DMX stuff.
I remember LIDL did something similar like 15 years ago. They set up a tent on their parking lot and sold all things they couldn't sell over the year for like 10% of their original price and less.
DO u happen to know of any other sales like that here in Finland? I have almost given up on finding good stuff, so I mostly order from huuto when i see something of value.
The drives were a great score. I would just use them to back up data. Hell, you could backup the same data on 2 or 3 drives if you were really worried about 1. Triple redundancy for $3. Wouldn't those solar panels be worth it for a dollar?
Where / how do you get notified of sales / dumps like this? As a dirt poor tech enthusiast id love to start scavenging but I don't know how to find local things like this.
Maybe someone's set up a site that tracks who's running warehouse clearance sales like these? If not, maybe you could. Call it TechWarehouseClearanceSales.com.au or something like that.
Seriously!!!! I need to be connected to this! I am in usa, and I know there are thousands of companies that just discard all of these items as well. Where can we get a cut into these deals??????
if you really wanted you could go there buy a bunch of expensive items that are in good cosmetic condition then buy a working one from an interstate store then a day later return the faulty one in the new box and get a refund so you get a working one for next to nothing or exchange it and get 2 working units for the price of 1
I scored a dead one of those rack-mount subwoofer amplifiers for free a couple of years ago. The output stage appeared to have caught fire, so there was no chance of repairing it. It made an excellent enclosure for a stereo amp I built myself though! :)
I could buy even 1000kg of these powertech smps. I'm soooo jelaous that there is no sales like that in my country :< Broken unit like that is about 100$ in my country ^^ I could turn all that crap into bag of money.
Great score. Wish I had something like that near me. Just wanted to say that you should test those drives by powering them on a bench supply first, with and without the 3.3v rail. I had a drive recently that had a bad regulator on it that was causing some weird power issues and it eventually killed the computers power supply. It was intermittent, but was occasionally trying to force 12v on the 5v rail and occasionally shorted. Didn't discover the power issues until it was too late but at least I was able to fix the power supply. :/ Edit: Really wish there was something like that near me. I seem to like the broken stuff more and I don't know why. Is that some mental illness? I don't know, maybe its just that its so cheap.
I would even take these power amps. Nice to use the case and power supply section. With a bit of luck they have decent transformers in them. To bad they don't have these things in my country :(
You lucked dog, you!!! Love their catalog, first saw them in the states and now I am stationed in the EU, take a long time to get stuff sent over here. The late RadioShack in the USA used to have similar tent sales of all their refurbs, discontinued and non working goods.
Dave, I had to swap out one of my UPS systems at home and low and behold, the new one won't work with my high efficiency PFC power supply in my PC. I don't suppose you would want to do a video discussing stepped PWM sine wave UPS's and why they don't work with power factor correcting high efficiency power supplies would you? :)
bottom line, sine wave is just fast PWM, but its not the best filtering on the output as they are designed to be used for AC/DC equipment, like computer and stuff and harmonics are not always a problem. you high PCF correction algoritm gets affected by the the harmonics. and there comes the problem. Why do you need PFC, I've never heard of anyone paying for reactive power in non-industrial applications. You high-efficiency PFC power supply might not be as smart as they pretend. anyhow, bottom line, harmonics, which probably are not regulated in your UPS.
I don't need PFC but it's getting harder to find quality power supplies that don't include it. My guess as to why would be to try to cram a kilowatt PSU into the same ATX form factor that started out at 250w without baking the components. In my case it's a 750w thermaltake bronze with active power factor correction. Probably needed to hit the 80% efficiency benchmark.
Those amplifiers at 2:00 have been made for over 15 years, and have been rebranded as the Wharfedale WPA-3038 and also there was an Eltax version. They're pretty crappy, with a poor signal-to-noise ratio, although to be fair, the one I had was actually a 2003 build and still working, so they do actually last.
I actually work at a Jaycar shop. We do process alot of returns in store but I never thought that this much stuff was sent back! I even saw stuff from more than 7 or 8 years ago in those piles (Even considering the upload date)!
Setup a JBOD disk array with Stablebit Drivepool! You can setup duplication but the best part is that it also plays nicely with "Green" hard drives and data recovery software if anything goes wrong.
You tore my heart apart with this video. I love to scavenge parts, would've brought some power supplies, inverters and power amps home. I'm so sad now, gonna go get drunk. Just kidding :D
I love stuff like this, honestly. even crap electronics, just gut 'em for parts. The turntables are left over because anyone who actually uses LPs wouldn't use a crap turntable like that. Total score on the hard drives, if you can find some JBOD solution or something, there's your backups! or a file server kinda thing for home media why not? Thanks Dave for keeping the dumpster dive relevant!
Do a RAID 6 setup with a bunch of the drives, and allocate others for backing up a 500GB SSD. I use a bunch of bare drives with an eSATA dock in order to do cold backups of some of my drives. I simply store them in a safe, and simply grab the oldest one, and image over it, thus allowing for around a year worth of monthly snapshots.
In the USA, namely Torrance California there use to be a Computer Salvage yard which I called the Computer Graveyard. You could buy old equipment and parts at low low prices. It's how I was able to by my Xerox 6085 Star Workstation (Runs Xerox Global View "Windows) from 1985 for $30.00. I miss that place.
You can buy a dock that allows you to simply drop in a sata drive and run it. Grab one of those and use those drives as offline storage of footage or media or something?
That nightvision amplifier looks very similar to what i own. Mine does have a proper light amplification tube, but it also has an IR LED for complete darkness. Practically - in outside conditions - you need the IR only if you want to see details, such as if you're searching for something on the ground. Even a starry, but moonless night is enough to give it enough light to amplify and keep you on the road, path or whatever. Motion detecting is quite impaired though, but that relates to the properties of human eye and brains.
10:55 Another tip. Those 'hanging scales' that people use to check for baggage weight at airports? Well, the units with the stuff that hasn't been removed (like batteries or HDDs) will weigh more. Also useful if you can't get the damn thing open because of exotic or rusted screws.
Well, if buy your vinyl 10 pieces a dollar, it probably doesn't matter :) But ignoring the sound, all components are cheap as shit and if you get a turntable from Walmart for 50 bucks, I'd be worried that that thing will plow a new groove in to your precious vinyl, so I would never put mine on one of those cheap ass plastic things.
This seems like a duplicate? Not talking about the one on EEVBlog2, but there's an identical one on this channel already, unless this one has any changes.
I have experimented with handbreak. You couldn't possibly make a youtube encoding and uploading tutorial could you? That'd be really useful as you have a lot of experience.
When I owned San Jose Computer, I went to these kind of sales all the time. I found that usually over half the stuff works just fine.. They were avoiding tax
One of the Jessops shops near me did something like this a few years back, 99% off everything. Got a load of camera batteries for a few pence each, made some decent money reselling them on eBay. Just wish I'd had more money at the time, went back an hour later and the shop was empty.
Parts Express outside Dayton, Ohio has a yearly tent sale/audio competition. Nothing on this scale, but a lot of faulty/damaged audio equipment and other miscellany. Prices decrease throughout the day and are very negotiable towards the end. Great resource for older/discontinued equipment, electronic related odds and ends, and the occasional oddball great find. I found it well worth a 2.5 hour drive!
Because then whenever someone tells you to get a life, you can provide a receipt! Seriously, it's probably an easter egg in the inventory database or something like that.
I actually work there. A bunch of people in one of the shops figured out how to make their own products and associate a code into the system. Then once everyone found out, as a joke, we would just put like 200 life on someones receipt (It cost nothing. Deep.). It actually fucked with the warehouse ordering system to the point that ex repair products were being sent to stores under that code and no one knew what to do with them. We get bored alot at work.
be prepared for white van sales of highest end audio equipment! looks like there was enough stuff to make a fpv drone with dvr, which is infinetly easier to fly and more fun than one might imagine.
With the price of the drives you got, I'd say optimize for storage capacity with an automated backup to a cloud storage server. Last time I checked, JBOD is cheaper to implement and simpler to set up compared to RAID, and you get more capacity as well (JBOD = Just a Bunch Of Disks). Using a cloud backup service of some sort solves the major weak-point of a JBOD array, as well as providing you with an off-site backup in case something happens to the storage server's location. Besides, all the disks were acquired at the same time. Assuming similar usage patterns (easily satisfied by them all being used in a storage array), it's reasonable to say that as soon as one drive fails, the rest of that same model and capacity are soon to follow. RAID won't save you from that unless you take the array offline and replace the failed drive as soon as you know it's failed, and that could get expensive quick (especially compared to initial expenditure).
Buy a server off eBay like an IBM x3650 M3 (check auctions) or any somewhat recent 2.5 inch harddrive servers newer than 2010(do not buy 1u server). You can make use of them in a huge raid array and backup all your videos and other files. I would recommend freenas as an os and maybe also do some zfs stuff too.
Here's a challenge Dave, How about sacrificing a couple of those drives to present a series of videos on how to fix broken hard drives. The videos could open up a broken HD and show the various things that can go wrong, how to test for these things and how to fix them. eg the circuit board goes bung or the disk read head goes bung.
Are those 100mW lasers legal in Australia without a permit. I have a couple of really cool disco lasers in Bangkok but cannot bring them back here due to their power output.
a better idea you could go there buy a bunch of expensive items that are in good cosmetic condition then buy a working one from an interstate store then a day later return the faulty one in the new box and get a refund so you get a working one for next to nothing or exchange it and get 2 working units for the price of 1 its genius
if you are really sneaky you could open up both units and swap out the internals then you can return the faulty one to a local store and there would be no way of knowing
Or just get one cheap SSD with 10x higher speed of that RAID array with less then 1% power consumption. Plus using old SSD is super dodgy, you never know when they might die. I would never use or buy used HDD. One interesting thing would be to try to restore the data a look what is on them.
Probably a good thing that I was unaware of this sale... missus would be fairly unhappy if I rocked up with a van load of *more* faulty equipment to add to the pile. And yeah, I know from experience that those Digitech amps are woeful. Would have liked to grab some of the cheap lighting kit though.
Wow. Lucky devil. I would have brought a truck and loaded up. I'd be like a kid in the candy store.
id bring a fleet of semi trucks on day 1 and just take it all
haha same here :)
How do people find out about these sales? I really wish I had the opportunity to go to some of these. (in the US)
I need to find a place like this near me! I'm so jealous.
Bloody hell, how does one learn about events like this? I have never seen anything like this in my country.
Went to a sale kind of like this in the states a while ago. Also ended up buying like 30 PVR's for a grand total of like $50. Each one of them had a 500GB hard drive inside, and a couple were a slightly different model (didn't really notice any discernible difference inside) with 1TB hard drives. Was such an awesome score.
Dave I can not believe that you did not take all those power supplies, they would have made a perfect giveaway. Only the real electronics nerds would applied, since they are faulty and need repair :)
I guess Australian eBay is going to be flooded with stuff from that sale! LOL
lol yeah at least some ebayers clean them before selling, not like the majority of lowlifes that sell stuff all crusty and dirty for over average prices.
Going for the stuff with HDDs in it was a good call. Even 500GB ones have a resale value higher than a dollar, and even if you didn't wanna sell them, you can never really have too much external storage.
I wish I could find something like this in the states!
Dave, could you get Doug Ford back in the lab to take a look at that amp? Would be interesting to hear both of you discuss, shall we say, the limitations of its design.
Hmm, interesting idea.
The chips probably supposed to be like that, plug it in and see what happens haha
Yes indeed, I bet that man would have alot of interesting stuff to say.
I am a current Jaycar Electronics staff member and majority of all that would've been from the 100+ stores around aus as part of the company's stock return process. Every store has a PER (Past Economical repair) process in place so everything under $150 gets destroyed at store level everything else gets sent back to the warehouse to either get fixed and reissued back to the store as a refurbished item or as shown be sold to the public for spares. And yes i have sold many a life to customers.
It's the worst when you do a stock check on life only to discover it's Out Of Stock. xD
so those are AT LEAST $150?
do these sales happen in adelaide?
also your pricing department is from the darkest depths of hell (no reason for everything to be so damn expensive)
The sales usually only take place at the warehouse itself, which is in Sydney.
This is the most awesome thing I've seen. We never have those in Europe :(
As far as I knwo its some stupid law.....
THANKS EU!
I prefer to know that this garbage end up in a recycling facility that in the nature.
ultort As Dave said, it was all going to an e-waste facility if it wasn't sold.
I can recycle them myself if I can't fix them. But I would of taken some quad copters and some other stuff for 1$ a piece I could get 10-20 make some of them work and give them as present and recycle what is left.
There is no EU rule that says this can't happen, but we also don't have any such big retailer that would have its own brand from china.
Man, I'd love to have gotten my hands on them hard drives! I'd have grabbed a few of the inverters and tried to got one or two good one's out to it. That BGA chip was hilarious... _Psst! Balls are showing!_
This video will get flagged
Balls.
Oh god not the balls and flagging
Obviously not advertiser friendly.
Bloody good heatsink compound though.
omg.. so glad I'm not down in AU.. I'd probably have grabbed 1-2K$ worth of stuff, and have to expand the house later.
I'd probably have grabbed a dozen of the Xenon torches for the carrying cases alone.. not to mention a pallet full of DMX stuff.
for 1 k you could buy everything there, including unlimited amounts of life
For those who saw the original video on EEVBlog2, skip to 9:00
thank you!
Thanks!
G
Why isn't something like this here in germany? :(
I remember LIDL did something similar like 15 years ago. They set up a tent on their parking lot and sold all things they couldn't sell over the year for like 10% of their original price and less.
Because all your shit you don't want/out of warranty gets sold in Romania. Source: all my computers
conrad doesnt go down to 1 dollar but they have a tent outside the wernberg store. also most stores have a bin for the faulty stuff.
also check pollin for discount stuff.
DO u happen to know of any other sales like that here in Finland? I have almost given up on finding good stuff, so I mostly order from huuto when i see something of value.
The drives were a great score. I would just use them to back up data. Hell, you could backup the same data on 2 or 3 drives if you were really worried about 1. Triple redundancy for $3.
Wouldn't those solar panels be worth it for a dollar?
Where / how do you get notified of sales / dumps like this? As a dirt poor tech enthusiast id love to start scavenging but I don't know how to find local things like this.
I noticed it on the Jaycar website a couple of days before the event.
Maybe someone's set up a site that tracks who's running warehouse clearance sales like these? If not, maybe you could. Call it TechWarehouseClearanceSales.com.au or something like that.
Seriously!!!! I need to be connected to this! I am in usa, and I know there are thousands of companies that just discard all of these items as well. Where can we get a cut into these deals??????
I wish I could've grabbed a few of those generators! Would've been an interesting learning experience, tearing them down!
Wouldn't these UPS be good source for 12v batteries?
yup, just for scrap you'd be turning a profit, nevermind if they are modified square sine wave...
the transistor/ igbt inside too XD
if you really wanted
you could go there buy a bunch of expensive items that are in good cosmetic condition then buy a working one from an interstate store then a day later return the faulty one in the new box and get a refund so you get a working one for next to nothing or exchange it and get 2 working units for the price of 1
that's totally crazy man I wish we have places like that in the UK because I would go coo coo
Wow, I want to go there too :(
Does anyone know if there's something like that in germany too and what I have to look for?
try pearl.de they shure have a ton of scrap
Hmm, seems a little bit like Pollin...
I would've got all those big inverters, just for their cases.
I scored a dead one of those rack-mount subwoofer amplifiers for free a couple of years ago. The output stage appeared to have caught fire, so there was no chance of repairing it.
It made an excellent enclosure for a stereo amp I built myself though! :)
Lol. "the output stage appeared to have caught fire". Obviously, they couldn't afford any output protection?
Just a tip some DVRs/PVRs have a setting on the hard drives turned off so they don't spin up on start up so use HDAT2 to fix that issue.
Fuck it! I am moving to Austria!
(Not Australia)?
TheMixedupstuff Don't ruin it...
Eviltech
How's that?
(Changed the comment so it's hidden)
TheMixedupstuff It's a running joke. Me commenting to you was also joking. Don't dig in to it...
Austria? Isn't that where Kangaroos are from?!
I wish they did such sales around here :/
I could buy even 1000kg of these powertech smps.
I'm soooo jelaous that there is no sales like that in my country :<
Broken unit like that is about 100$ in my country ^^
I could turn all that crap into bag of money.
mine too. the broken are repaired and sell like new. (3 times more expensive that in the rest of the world)
and by bag of money he means currency is Vietnamese Dong
Great score. Wish I had something like that near me. Just wanted to say that you should test those drives by powering them on a bench supply first, with and without the 3.3v rail. I had a drive recently that had a bad regulator on it that was causing some weird power issues and it eventually killed the computers power supply. It was intermittent, but was occasionally trying to force 12v on the 5v rail and occasionally shorted. Didn't discover the power issues until it was too late but at least I was able to fix the power supply. :/
Edit: Really wish there was something like that near me. I seem to like the broken stuff more and I don't know why. Is that some mental illness? I don't know, maybe its just that its so cheap.
it's almost worth to fly down to Australia just to get this stuff
Holy Hell! I have $800 in my pocket. I would have spent every dime.
"I might have got ripped off for a dollar" haha xD Great vid as always, thanks for showing us :D
Why not these in Finland! IM ALMOST CRYING TO GET THERE!!!!
Tears from India! :'(
I would like these in finland too :D
Here they don't even have a proper e-waste disposal system. It would be fine if you dumped a 200Ah SLA battery into your kitchen waste bin. -_-
In Finland you would be in prison by doing that.
We need that stuff here before it is too late!
I would even take these power amps. Nice to use the case and power supply section.
With a bit of luck they have decent transformers in them.
To bad they don't have these things in my country :(
You lucked dog, you!!!
Love their catalog, first saw them in the states and now I am stationed in the EU, take a long time to get stuff sent over here.
The late RadioShack in the USA used to have similar tent sales of all their refurbs, discontinued and non working goods.
Dave, I had to swap out one of my UPS systems at home and low and behold, the new one won't work with my high efficiency PFC power supply in my PC. I don't suppose you would want to do a video discussing stepped PWM sine wave UPS's and why they don't work with power factor correcting high efficiency power supplies would you? :)
bottom line, sine wave is just fast PWM, but its not the best filtering on the output as they are designed to be used for AC/DC equipment, like computer and stuff and harmonics are not always a problem. you high PCF correction algoritm gets affected by the the harmonics. and there comes the problem.
Why do you need PFC, I've never heard of anyone paying for reactive power in non-industrial applications.
You high-efficiency PFC power supply might not be as smart as they pretend. anyhow, bottom line, harmonics, which probably are not regulated in your UPS.
I don't need PFC but it's getting harder to find quality power supplies that don't include it. My guess as to why would be to try to cram a kilowatt PSU into the same ATX form factor that started out at 250w without baking the components. In my case it's a 750w thermaltake bronze with active power factor correction. Probably needed to hit the 80% efficiency benchmark.
Please share dates for the next sale to your viewers! I'm sure there would be nothing left!
Those amplifiers at 2:00 have been made for over 15 years, and have been rebranded as the Wharfedale WPA-3038 and also there was an Eltax version. They're pretty crappy, with a poor signal-to-noise ratio, although to be fair, the one I had was actually a 2003 build and still working, so they do actually last.
I actually work at a Jaycar shop. We do process alot of returns in store but I never thought that this much stuff was sent back! I even saw stuff from more than 7 or 8 years ago in those piles (Even considering the upload date)!
Setup a JBOD disk array with Stablebit Drivepool! You can setup duplication but the best part is that it also plays nicely with "Green" hard drives and data recovery software if anything goes wrong.
You tore my heart apart with this video. I love to scavenge parts, would've brought some power supplies, inverters and power amps home. I'm so sad now, gonna go get drunk. Just kidding :D
How would one find a sale like this?
I love stuff like this, honestly. even crap electronics, just gut 'em for parts. The turntables are left over because anyone who actually uses LPs wouldn't use a crap turntable like that. Total score on the hard drives, if you can find some JBOD solution or something, there's your backups! or a file server kinda thing for home media why not? Thanks Dave for keeping the dumpster dive relevant!
Regarding the turntables, couldn't some robotics project use the motors out of them?
How can I know about these sales events? I have absolutely no way to be notified about them
How did you hear about this? I'm in Sydney too and I had no idea!
Will there be another one next year?
Dave where did you see the ad for this sale?? Im in Perth and would love to find where ours was.
Do a RAID 6 setup with a bunch of the drives, and allocate others for backing up a 500GB SSD. I use a bunch of bare drives with an eSATA dock in order to do cold backups of some of my drives. I simply store them in a safe, and simply grab the oldest one, and image over it, thus allowing for around a year worth of monthly snapshots.
In the USA, namely Torrance California there use to be a Computer Salvage yard which I called the Computer Graveyard. You could buy old equipment and parts at low low prices. It's how I was able to by my Xerox 6085 Star Workstation (Runs Xerox Global View "Windows) from 1985 for $30.00. I miss that place.
Wow such a score, would love to get my hands on the hard drives for a server
You can buy a dock that allows you to simply drop in a sata drive and run it. Grab one of those and use those drives as offline storage of footage or media or something?
That nightvision amplifier looks very similar to what i own. Mine does have a proper light amplification tube, but it also has an IR LED for complete darkness. Practically - in outside conditions - you need the IR only if you want to see details, such as if you're searching for something on the ground. Even a starry, but moonless night is enough to give it enough light to amplify and keep you on the road, path or whatever. Motion detecting is quite impaired though, but that relates to the properties of human eye and brains.
10:55
Another tip.
Those 'hanging scales' that people use to check for baggage weight at airports? Well, the units with the stuff that hasn't been removed (like batteries or HDDs) will weigh more. Also useful if you can't get the damn thing open because of exotic or rusted screws.
the faulty UPSes would be good for the SLA batteries alone. i would have grabbed a pile of them.
im gonna have to go down to one of these jaycar things. This is so cool I liked those power amps. Glad i live in Australia!
Never buy a plastic turntable, not even for a Dollar.
Noisy as hell on the playback, I take it?
Well, if buy your vinyl 10 pieces a dollar, it probably doesn't matter :) But ignoring the sound, all components are cheap as shit and if you get a turntable from Walmart for 50 bucks, I'd be worried that that thing will plow a new groove in to your precious vinyl, so I would never put mine on one of those cheap ass plastic things.
How do you find these amazing deals! I'd love something like this in the states.
Definitely do some archive storage project. With those little drives you could fit a lot of storage in a small space.
This seems like a duplicate? Not talking about the one on EEVBlog2, but there's an identical one on this channel already, unless this one has any changes.
Audio has been fixed
Ah, yes. It sounded a bit crusty.
Audio was fixed. Handbrake caused an issue for some unknown reason.
I have experimented with handbreak. You couldn't possibly make a youtube encoding and uploading tutorial could you? That'd be really useful as you have a lot of experience.
I wonder if those ups power supplies are worth fixing I need one
When I owned San Jose Computer, I went to these kind of sales all the time. I found that usually over half the stuff works just fine.. They were avoiding tax
Bloody hell! I wouldn't mind some of those PA speakers, even if they are terrible.
Do they do this same time every year?
Well it is on next weekend!
Ben Helweg yeah, seems to be late september every year
Oh gosh! Such a sale is like heaven on earth! :-)
One of the Jessops shops near me did something like this a few years back, 99% off everything. Got a load of camera batteries for a few pence each, made some decent money reselling them on eBay. Just wish I'd had more money at the time, went back an hour later and the shop was empty.
Didn't know this existed, I definitely owe you a beer Dave. Extra points for the extensive usage of dodgy and crusty.
"For five bucks, duude" - I lost there :D
Parts Express outside Dayton, Ohio has a yearly tent sale/audio competition. Nothing on this scale, but a lot of faulty/damaged audio equipment and other miscellany. Prices decrease throughout the day and are very negotiable towards the end. Great resource for older/discontinued equipment, electronic related odds and ends, and the occasional oddball great find. I found it well worth a 2.5 hour drive!
25 HDD's eh? I'll take 10. I'll even double your buying price!
double price is $2
you're brilliant!
il pay $5 each
You can make descent flywheels of the hard-drive plates for motors etc. :)
I have same 2.5 hdd. Working 24/7 for 4 years straight. No problems.
Damn wishing i knew this was on, how do you know when these sales are on ?
I would love to take everything and have a look inside, especially for a dollar each!
i stopped watching because im so jealous !!!!!
OMG I so want those turn tables! I'm sure at least one of them work.
Why on earth does jaycar have "Life" as an item?
Ever met an engineer who doesn't need to get a life? I know I do!
Because then whenever someone tells you to get a life, you can provide a receipt!
Seriously, it's probably an easter egg in the inventory database or something like that.
I actually work there. A bunch of people in one of the shops figured out how to make their own products and associate a code into the system. Then once everyone found out, as a joke, we would just put like 200 life on someones receipt (It cost nothing. Deep.). It actually fucked with the warehouse ordering system to the point that ex repair products were being sent to stores under that code and no one knew what to do with them. We get bored alot at work.
What's the story with the soldering Irons at the beginning I have one of those - it wasn't that cheap and works very well. Just a bit beige!
be prepared for white van sales of highest end audio equipment!
looks like there was enough stuff to make a fpv drone with dvr, which is infinetly easier to fly and more fun than one might imagine.
With the price of the drives you got, I'd say optimize for storage capacity with an automated backup to a cloud storage server.
Last time I checked, JBOD is cheaper to implement and simpler to set up compared to RAID, and you get more capacity as well (JBOD = Just a Bunch Of Disks).
Using a cloud backup service of some sort solves the major weak-point of a JBOD array, as well as providing you with an off-site backup in case something happens to the storage server's location.
Besides, all the disks were acquired at the same time. Assuming similar usage patterns (easily satisfied by them all being used in a storage array), it's reasonable to say that as soon as one drive fails, the rest of that same model and capacity are soon to follow.
RAID won't save you from that unless you take the array offline and replace the failed drive as soon as you know it's failed, and that could get expensive quick (especially compared to initial expenditure).
Buy a server off eBay like an IBM x3650 M3 (check auctions) or any somewhat recent 2.5 inch harddrive servers newer than 2010(do not buy 1u server). You can make use of them in a huge raid array and backup all your videos and other files. I would recommend freenas as an os and maybe also do some zfs stuff too.
Are the amplifiers any good?
Here's a challenge Dave, How about sacrificing a couple of those drives to present a series of videos on how to fix broken hard drives. The videos could open up a broken HD and show the various things that can go wrong, how to test for these things and how to fix them. eg the circuit board goes bung or the disk read head goes bung.
in Northern California there was HSC electronics. Lots of surplus stuff, lab gear and general nerd gold.
Where did you hear about it (in Australia)?
God damn! Are they doing that for the Melbourne Jaycar?
Yep, audio's perfect on this one, good job Dave... :)
From Scotland: our Big Clive would love this.
You can use the hard drives for a storage array for deep learning
about the PVR with the 'unpopulated socket', it could just as easily be for the 'improved sibling' that requires a more feature-rich chip.
Are those 100mW lasers legal in Australia without a permit. I have a couple of really cool disco lasers in Bangkok but cannot bring them back here due to their power output.
I'd buy ALLl the UPS's just for the batteries ;)
Why not try to fix them if you can
a better idea
you could go there buy a bunch of expensive items that are in good
cosmetic condition then buy a working one from an interstate store then a
day later return the faulty one in the new box and get a refund so you
get a working one for next to nothing or exchange it and get 2 working
units for the price of 1
its genius
Your right that is a better idea:-)
if you are really sneaky you could open up both units and swap out the internals then you can return the faulty one to a local store and there would be no way of knowing
how so?
Damn, id love to have a bunch of hard disks to mess around with, like playing with linux and get some speed using RAID 0
Or just get one cheap SSD with 10x higher speed of that RAID array with less then 1% power consumption.
Plus using old SSD is super dodgy, you never know when they might die. I would never use or buy used HDD.
One interesting thing would be to try to restore the data a look what is on them.
To dave, mind sending those old DVR boxes to me so I can put them to good use? (Recode them etc)
Did you manage to get that night vision thing?
OH MAN! wish I knew about this! how did you find out about it?
What state is this held in?
im assuming its in NSW, which is 10 hours drive form where I am.
Probably a good thing that I was unaware of this sale... missus would be fairly unhappy if I rocked up with a van load of *more* faulty equipment to add to the pile. And yeah, I know from experience that those Digitech amps are woeful.
Would have liked to grab some of the cheap lighting kit though.
Is there a way i can find sales like these in my area?
5:30 how much does this POWERTECH cost?
BTW is there a Facebook group or something for these sales?
How do i find out about stuff like this happening in my area?
Did you find out if the hard drives are locked ?