# Value of Hard Drive ribbon cable



## NobleMetalsRecovery (Mar 22, 2009)

I was wondering what a ribbon cable from an old 486 or early pentium computer could be worth? I removed all the pins from all the connectors from one cable. The yield was 8 grams.

The I plugged it all into a spreadsheet:

The following is based on a gold yield of 1/4 of 1% (just a guess) of the metal weight and gold at $1,000 per ounce.

8.00000 grams
0.00250	1/4 % gold
0.02000 @ Gold in grams
31.10000	grams per ounce
0.00064	@ Gold in ounces
1000.00	$ gold per ounce
$0.64309	Value of pins in one ribbon cable

So, it looks like at 1/4 % gold yield a cable is worth 64 cents. if the yield is half that it's 32 cents, if the yield is double, then it's worth $1.28 per cable. Years ago I used to cut off the plastic connectors along the cable and get 50 cents a pound for the connectors, plastic and all.

During last few years scrap metal boom, with the high copper prices I was selling the whole ribbon cable to scrap dealers at about 60 cents per pound. I'm glad that I missed about 100 pounds of the ribbon cable. It looks like its better to either cut off the plastic connectors, or just remove the pins while still attached to the cable. The cable can be saved to sell later when the next copper boom occurs.

Please ignore the title for the picture, it has no connection to the picture.


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## NobleMetalsRecovery (Mar 22, 2009)

The cable that I used was for the data was NOT a hard drive cable. It was a floppy drive cable. There's a big difference. The hard drive cable only has 3 connectors, the floppy cable has 7 connectors, and 3 of the connectors on the floppy drive cable are larger with more gold plated surface area. 

It looks like a hard drive cable would only yield about 1/4 of what a floppy drive cable would yield. There's very little metal with only a small amount of plating just on the tips.


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## DNIndustry (Jul 7, 2009)

Just my 2 cents, 7 connectors would most likely make it a SCSI cable.


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## patnor1011 (Jul 7, 2009)

also while you based your calculation on weight of metal pins, hd cable has much smaler - lighter pins. the gold plated surface is smaler compared to bigger pins but seems to be equal /when you consider diffrence in size/to surface of bigger pins in some examples even larger as I came across some pins where half of them was plated :wink:


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## Anonymous (Aug 28, 2009)

last year i was getting1.00-1.35 w/ends on highes this year. 65 a # ends .25 #


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