sted Posted July 1, 2015 Posted July 1, 2015 now im more often than not fitting ssds into new laptops any ideas what i can do with all the 2.5" sata drives im taking out? Only thing i can think of (bar keeping a few as spares but i dont need loads of spares) is to find a motherboard and cse that can take a bucket load of drives a low end cpu some ram and turn it into a freenas box to use for backups or hosting non critical data (set it up as iscsi and just treat it like a drive in my server(s)) any other suggestions as it does seem a bit of a waste just shoving them in a box never to be used (and iny suggestions as to mb/cases that can take 10 or more drives that dont cost the earth?
JRowley Posted July 1, 2015 Posted July 1, 2015 Take the platters out and use them as futuristic drinks coasters? 1
bald_pig Posted July 1, 2015 Posted July 1, 2015 You could throw them into enclosures to use as external drives, or give them away Don't forget to open one up for the IT classroom! 1
sted Posted July 1, 2015 Author Posted July 1, 2015 You could throw them into enclosures to use as external drives, or give them away Don't forget to open one up for the IT classroom! it classroom whats one of those these days quite a few of my schools including the one i have most spare drives at just dont have one anymore the space was needed for a normal classroom (hence why i currently work on the bench in the staff room kitchen as for some weird reason its fitted with 4 power/data points lol)
3s-gtech Posted July 1, 2015 Posted July 1, 2015 We have hundreds now, literally. Many of them brand new pulls from equipment. Not been able to find anything to do with them, it's a struggle to even give them away. In theory they'd go into some of our servers as extra storage, but I wouldn't want to trust consumer drives in that job. 1
sted Posted July 1, 2015 Author Posted July 1, 2015 We have hundreds now, literally. Many of them brand new pulls from equipment. Not been able to find anything to do with them, it's a struggle to even give them away. In theory they'd go into some of our servers as extra storage, but I wouldn't want to trust consumer drives in that job. thats why im thinking freenas and zfs the likelihood of enough failing to kill the array is i would of thought minimal. Found supermicro and a asrock boards that has 18 ports onboard but fails the cheap test lol
JRowley Posted July 1, 2015 Posted July 1, 2015 (edited) You could turn them into some sort of display? Use the front as white and the back as black you could create some pixel art with them, get the art department involved. Alternatively you could make a live display with windows cut into the drives so you can see the arm moving, me and the head of IT here put this together a few years ago, sadly I couldn't get the cut away drive to work properly, but that was old IDE drive. Edited July 1, 2015 by JRowley
halbaradkenafin Posted July 1, 2015 Posted July 1, 2015 Start building yourself a throne. You don't need to sit on it all the time of course, only for when SLT or similar are due to come see you. 1
Dos_Box Posted July 1, 2015 Posted July 1, 2015 Paint them in bright colours and use them as hip Lego
dhicks Posted July 1, 2015 Posted July 1, 2015 (edited) Only thing i can think of (bar keeping a few as spares but i dont need loads of spares) is to find a motherboard and cse that can take a bucket load of drives a low end cpu some ram and turn it into a freenas box to use for backups or hosting non critical data Backblaze are the people to check out - they build large-capacity file servers to run their storage business: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/petabytes-on-a-budget-how-to-build-cheap-cloud-storage/ They sell the chasis, you can build your own 45-disk 4U server, or they might do a 2.5" version now. At home, I've tried out some of their ideas at a slightly smaller scale. To plug lots and lots of harddrives in to one motherboard you can use SATA expander cards. You need to have a SATA controller on the motherboard (or, more likely, on an expansion card) that supports SATA expension - I use an ASMmedia ASM1062 SATA card in my server and five-way SATA expansion cards from Amazon. I have the harddrives sat in 5-slot "test" frames - I think I got them from Startech, but I can't seem to find the link now. If you're going to use a setup as above to test out how to create a large, distributed file system (such as with Ceph or similar) then it should work well. It might well work okay in production, too, but there are probably more efficient ways to build a multi-disk array these days. However, as a production server, something like the above attached to a multi-core processor and split up in to multiple virtual machines would work well - assign each virtual machine its own dedicated harddrive and you have the equivilant of something various companies are charging good money for (£50 - £100 per month), times however many harddrives you have attached. Edit: Just to add - if your school (or anyone) does any amount of media / video editing work, you could do worse than assign and label two harddrives per project and copy the data files over to them for storage / backups. Edited July 1, 2015 by dhicks 1
sted Posted July 1, 2015 Author Posted July 1, 2015 Backblaze are the people to check out - they build large-capacity file servers to run their storage business: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/petabytes-on-a-budget-how-to-build-cheap-cloud-storage/ They sell the chasis, you can build your own 45-disk 4U server, or they might do a 2.5" version now. At home, I've tried out some of their ideas at a slightly smaller scale. To plug lots and lots of harddrives in to one motherboard you can use SATA expander cards. You need to have a SATA controller on the motherboard (or, more likely, on an expansion card) that supports SATA expension - I use an ASMmedia ASM1062 SATA card in my server and five-way SATA expansion cards from Amazon. I have the harddrives sat in 5-slot "test" frames - I think I got them from Startech, but I can't seem to find the link now. If you're going to use a setup as above to test out how to create a large, distributed file system (such as with Ceph or similar) then it should work well. It might well work okay in production, too, but there are probably more efficient ways to build a multi-disk array these days. However, as a production server, something like the above attached to a multi-core processor and split up in to multiple virtual machines would work well - assign each virtual machine its own dedicated harddrive and you have the equivilant of something various companies are charging good money for (£50 - £100 per month), times however many harddrives you have attached. Edit: Just to add - if your school (or anyone) does any amount of media / video editing work, you could do worse than assign and label two harddrives per project and copy the data files over to them for storage / backups. its a primary so no need for massive video storage photos for foundation stage yes video editing not so much
davyboi Posted July 2, 2015 Posted July 2, 2015 Try selling them on ebay? even if you only get £10-£15 per drive its a bit of money for the school and its better than them sat taking up room in a cupboard somewhere. See if any local computer repair shops would buy them as spares? Or as others have said pick up some cheap caddys and give them to staff so they can keep their own backups**? **Or more likely save their entire careers worth of work to it with no other backup and then leave it on a bus/drop it/do some other sort of damage to it
LeMarchand Posted July 2, 2015 Posted July 2, 2015 Start building yourself a throne. You don't need to sit on it all the time of course, only for when SLT or similar are due to come see you. I like this idea. Haven't got time to do some photo editing, but I'm imagining the HDD equivalent of The Iron Throne. TV version if you have limited HDDS: Book version if supply is plentiful:
sted Posted July 2, 2015 Author Posted July 2, 2015 I like this idea. Haven't got time to do some photo editing, but I'm imagining the HDD equivalent of The Iron Throne. TV version if you have limited HDDS: [ATTACH=CONFIG]31403[/ATTACH] Book version if supply is plentiful: [ATTACH=CONFIG]31404[/ATTACH] the tvs shows boring enough never mind spending time rectreating a prop not to mention i have maybe 2 dozen here probably a lot more back at the office (dont technically work for the school 3rd party contractor) ebat just too many issues as a seller to even really consider it
sted Posted July 2, 2015 Author Posted July 2, 2015 What drive capacities are we talking about? iirc mainly 500gbs
cpjitservices Posted July 2, 2015 Posted July 2, 2015 We HD tune them make sure they are good, then whack them in caddies as external drives. Very handy. You can pickup USB3 caddies very cheap.
MrEprise Posted July 2, 2015 Posted July 2, 2015 I've been umming and arring about whether to ask and i'm probably being cheeky to ask, but would either of you (@sted or @3s-gtech) be willing (and whether your schools are willing) to send me a dozen of these new(ish) drives for the price of postage (or whatever?) If not, it's not a problem but I'd like to put drives like that to good use instead of just scrapping them.
p3t3r Posted July 2, 2015 Posted July 2, 2015 We have also been doing a similar SSD upgrade project. Just ordered a couple of hundred more. One of my team has a MooseFS (Features, Architecture and Requirements :: MooseFS network file system - Moose FS) project so we are putting lots of the old 2.5" drives into that. Its great to have ever expanding storage.
ricki Posted July 2, 2015 Posted July 2, 2015 Enclosures for staff or kids Nas with open nas Sell them and buy what you need Richard
bald_pig Posted July 3, 2015 Posted July 3, 2015 I've been umming and arring about whether to ask and i'm probably being cheeky to ask, but would either of you (@sted or @3s-gtech) be willing (and whether your schools are willing) to send me a dozen of these new(ish) drives for the price of postage (or whatever?) If not, it's not a problem but I'd like to put drives like that to good use instead of just scrapping them. I was contemplating asking as well, my maths says that 150 can be posted for about a fiver! I'd probably opt for less than that though lol
JATSO Posted July 3, 2015 Posted July 3, 2015 Well if anyone wants to donate a few ide 2.5 drives with a bigger capacity than 40gb they wouldn't go to waste as I have some laptops that windows and associated software has blown the space on. Need about 40. I am sure the school would be willing to pay the postage.
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