Excess Hard Drives

[Joanne]

So soon I'm going to find myself with 100 mechanical hard drives, most of which will be 500GB.

 

What can I do with them? Is there something somewhere where I can plug them all in and have ALL DA STORAGE? I'd be quite the mistress with 50TB.

 

Or should I just store them away in a cupboard and leave them to rot?

[Michael]

You can give them to me if you like 500GB in a lot of applications is still perfectly usable

[Joanne]

I want to use them for something ideally! I'll keep you in mind for being first in line if I decide to flog 'em

[Michael]

I'm guessing you've upgraded to SSDs? Or taken them out of other machines?

[DJ-1701]

I'd be quite the mistress with 50TB.

 

Ah, Missy, we meet again, you've regenerated since we last met...

 

I do not know of any cheap and easy stoarge device that can take 100 HDs... the only use for them I can think of (other than replacing dead ones) is dominos.

[sted]

yup at our office we have probably hundreds of 500gb/1tb 2.5 drives that are just sitting in boxes, ive got about half a dozen- a dozen in my car as spares if a pc needs a new hdd and msot of my schools have a stack of them. Its stupid how its cheaper to buy a laptop with a hdd and buy an ssd than buy the same laptop with an ssd fitted from the factory.

 

I did once look into getting a motherboard with shed loads (i think i found one with 18) of sata ports and shoving freenas on it but i was literally spending money for no real reason just to use stuff.

 

Its tempting to shove em in desktops and see if i can somehow copy my mdt base image to them so if i need to restore i can do it at sata rather than network speeds but even thats just an excuse to do something with them

[Norphy]

Theoretically? Yes.

 

Four of these:

http://www.span.com/product/NetStor-24-Bay-SAS-12GB-JBOD-NS385S-8028-R-19-Rack-4U-24x-3-5-SAS-SATA-HD-SAS-12GB-+-SAS-Expander-Redundant-PSU~43462

 

Some suitable RAID cards:

 

http://www.span.com/product/Avago-LSI-MegaRAID-SAS-SATA-Controller-MRSAS9286-8e-Single-LSI00332-L5-25421-20-SAS-SATA-6gbit-8-Port-Two-x4-External-SFF8088-PCI-Express-v3-0-x8-RAID-0-1-5-6~38849

 

A server which could take at least two of those cards

 

SAS Cables

 

However, you'd be spending at least £15k, by which point you may as well go to Dell and buy a proper NAS. Not to mention the power requirements to keep the thing running and that you'd either have to run it in RAID 10 or RAID 6 to protect against hardware failure and either lose half the capacity or comprise the performance of the thing.

 

Not worth it

 

PS this is very much "back of an envelope" thinking, not guaranteed to work

Edited June 28, 2016 by Norphy

[Joanne]

Hahahah!! Wow 15k... maybe not

 

Yeah I got 100 SSD's and I'm slowly but surely upgrading all laptops and slamming Windows 10 on teh bad boi's.

 

Maybe I will prise all the magnets out of them and make a wind turbine...

[sonofsanta]

In three years we have found no use whatsoever for them. We nabbed a couple each for an extra RAID0 in our machines, but realistically... too small to be of any use anywhere. Hand 'em out like candy; maybe ride through town in the back of a convertible and throw them to the crowds?

[3s-gtech]

We did manage to sell a great number of them (250 or so?) - sadly I now look at my shelf and wonder where all of these other ones came from! I haven't found a use for them, a couple are here as spares for servers/NASs/CCTV systems that use desktop drives, the rest are waste - I think the bulk came from 2009 iMacs which I upgraded to SSD.

[Joanne]

Can you weigh them in for scrap?

[pcstru]

Make something from them!

http://www.moletrap.co.uk/cast/melt

http://www.moletrap.co.uk/cast/octo-no-mmarks

Edited June 28, 2016 by pcstru

[sonofsanta]

No wait there is one use.

 

Break a 3.5" hard drive apart, take a platter out, tape a 10p piece in the hole in the middle and it makes a great cap for your mug so your tea is still hot when you get back to the office.

 

[mats]

..What can I do with them? Is there something somewhere where I can plug them all in and have ALL DA STORAGE? I'd be quite the mistress with 50TB.

 

Or should I just store them away in a cupboard and leave them to rot?

 

If they're going to end up in a cupboard, send them here. We have a server with about a dozen 2.5" drive slots. It could make a nice freenas backup device with 6 drives in a 3Tb raid 1. Might even try zfs on it..

[soapyfish]

I would ebay 4, 24x Bay DAS boxes daisy chained to each other and lastly 1 cable to a computer equipped with a Raid controller with and external port setup as a raid 10 for 25TB tolerant storage.......then I would stop looking at the leckky bills

 

or Buy this, it has 48HDD bays and is compatible with Windows !

 

Sun Sunfire X4500 server 2x2.8Ghz Opteron 290 DC 16Gb Ram 12x500Gb 6Tb | eBay

[bald_pig]

I can has HDD's?

[john]

Massive game of domino knockovers