For those of you considering to donate USB flash drives to our cause, you may ask yourself how is the recycled USB drive handled before going out to SugarLabs?
Below is a picture of some drives being digitally cleaned and erased before going out the door. We use Nexcopy duplicator equipment and with this gear, there is a D.o.D. erase function [Department of Defense grade function]. The USB erase function writes random ones-and-zeros to the entire memory space. So anything on the drive, whether it be inappropriate data, personal data or even virsus’ the erase function wipes them out.
Once the drive is completely written over with random binary data, we use a format function in the duplicator equipment and format the drives as FAT32. Not all drives will pass the erase function or the format function and those drives are taken out of the recycle process.
We have used the above procedure for years and very confident in the process and outcome. To donate your USB flash drives, you may visit our USB donation page to get the three step process.
For all of you who have donated, thank you! Please remember, if you include a note with your donated flash drives with a website link or blog address, we will be happy to post that link in this news room section of our site.
This week Recycle USB received 13 total drives for donation. Thank you for sending the drives. They will be sent to Sugar Labs on our next shipment out.
Recycle USB is a website for people looking to recycle their USB flash drives for a better cause.
Send your USB to school.
Each donated drive is loaded with Sugar, making it Sugar on a Stick. Sugar is a standalone computer operating system which runs off a USB flash drive. Sugar is developed to provide children a free portable and interactive learning environment in a self contained thumb drive.
Sending your USB stick to a recycle center holds far less Good Will then sending your USB stick to a child wanting to learn.
Here is how the USB journey begins:
Step 1: Collect all your old and unused USB sticks.
**Sugar requires a minimum 1GB stick**
Step 2: Send your USB drive(s) to RecycleUSB.com
Step 3: We receive the drives and perform a low-level format to clean the drive of any data.
Step 4: We then data load “Sugar On A Stick” operating system onto your donated USB flash drive to make the portable learning computer
Step 5: We send the finished product to Sugar Labs for deployment to any number of locations throughout the world.
Once Sugar Labs receives your donated drive, it is then deployed to any number of possible locations around the world. Your generous donation could go to a child in Peru, or South Africa or Thailand! Your flash drive will become a portable computer for a very lucky child.
This Good Will act of sending in your USB stick is far greater than recycling old components of a flash drive for a couple pennies in return
