what to do with hdd's

fightingfi

fightingfi

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Oct 9, 2008
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ive got some older platter hdd's ranging from 74x2 gig raptors, 80 gig and other older platter drives what do you guys do with them?
 
I use them to install secondary OS'es to play with since VM's and real metal are somewhat different.

I also use them to backup important files that don't change. Since they would be the backup of a backup, I don't sweat it if they stop working. I have an external drive caddy I can pop them in and out with.
 
For me at they stay on a shelf until they have no value at all. At work I have probably a hundred such drives. Sometimes I use them to test raid reliability in failure situations like hot pulling drives when the raid is active / rebuilding ...
 
fightingfi said:
ive got some older platter hdd's ranging from 74x2 gig raptors, 80 gig and other older platter drives what do you guys do with them?
Click to expand...
I had a few WD 80 GB SE IDE drives. Few things I did with them.
1) Charity PC Builds - I used them for a OS Drive
2) those 80 GB IDE Drives make the perfect Back Up Image Drive for a new OS. Load it on an old PATA External Drive and fire up Acronis. Place in a plastic HDD container that you get when you buy Hard Drives. Seal With Masking Tape, write in Marker 1) Which PC / Motherboard the Image belongs to and the 2) Windows Product Key.... 3) and the write DO NOT ERASE
 
I use old drives for offline backup.
Multiple copies of essential stuff and general system/data backups to aid fast recovery.
My smallest offline drive is 750GB, cant be bothered with less as they are generally very slow.
Smaller drives sit in a drawer somewhere.

I put a 100GB primary partition on many drives to act as test space for OS backups and recovery OS boot in case of a serious issue.
 
I would love a cheap 12+ disk JBOD NAS type device. Just slap all your old drives in and create a simple storage pool.

I have loads of 160/320/500GB HDDs that could still be useful if pulled together.
 
I send them off for recycling/scrap. Drives below 500 gig aren't worth the money it costs to run them other than some very specific circumstances where they're necessary, and if you know what those circumstances are, you wouldn't be asking what to do with the drives. The other big issue is that these are *old* drives, and are likely to fail earlier than you think.

Even spinners below 1 TB have a questionable value when it isn't hard to find a brand new 1 TB HDD for ~$50.
 
TheSmJ said:
I send them off for recycling/scrap. Drives below 500 gig aren't worth the money it costs to run them other than some very specific circumstances where they're necessary, and if you know what those circumstances are, you wouldn't be asking what to do with the drives. The other big issue is that these are *old* drives, and are likely to fail earlier than you think.

Even spinners below 1 TB have a questionable value when it isn't hard to find a brand new 1 TB HDD for ~$50.
Click to expand...

Lol you do realise that not everyone has TBs of anime stored on their systems?
 
I personally wouldn't bother doing anything with drives under 500GB (ESPECIALLY 200GB or under, due to the cheapness of USB sticks) or anything over 5 years old unless it's for caching, where the data literally cannot matter.

For backups, no matter how redundant that backup is, I wouldn't bother with it on old drives.

5 years tops is how long I'd give to a HDD that stores data.
 
I take them apart to get to the platters and magnets. You can get scrap value for the aluminum. Why be ghetto by hanging CDs from your rear-view mirror when it can be hard drive platters. Ohhhh!! Shiny!!!
 
Harvest the magnets and make free energy motors with them.
 
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