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What To Do With a Hundred Hard Drives?
Makoto916 writes "In five years with my current employer as the IT administrator, I've amassed a sizable cabinet of discarded hard drives; just shy of 100, in fact. All of the drives range in size from 20GB up to 300GB. They've all been stored in anti-stat bags, and spot checks of even the oldest ones show that most of them still work. Individually, they're mostly useless for our line of work, which is digital video production. However, the collective storage potential is quite significant. They are of varying size and speed, but the one commonality is they're all IDE. What is the best way to approach connecting all of these devices and realizing their storage potential? On a budget, of course. Now, I'd never use such an array for critical data storage, but it certainly would be useful as a massive backup array to our existing SAN that does store critical data. I have several spare and functioning PCs, but not nearly enough to utilize their internal IDE controllers; even with multiple add-in controllers, it still wouldn't be enough. Not to mention the nightmare of managing a bunch of independent PCs. I've looked into ATA Over Ethernet and there's a lot of potential there, but current 15 to 20 bay AoE cabinets are expensive, and single device enclosures are so rare that they're also expensive. Are there any hardware hackers out there who have crafted their own home-brew AoE systems? Could they scale to 100 drives? Is there a better way?"
A Thumper or Drivebox RAID system.
e Bay.
I doubt its worth using a bunch of old smaller drives.
between the power requirements and all the extra hardware needed to run them i would just sell them all on ebay and take the $ to buy a couple of huge drives, mirror and do iscsi with them.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
spin around in a circle and see who can throw them the greatest distance
Contrary to popular belief, Unix is user friendly. It just happens to be particular about who it makes friends with.
The magnets are fun to play with!
I'll take em off your hands. Just toss me a message or something. If not, I'm smelling a fun raid array.
Man, just throw them away. You're going to spend
more time and money trying to cobble them together
than if you just built a mutli-terabyte SAN. We spent $8K on a 30 disk 6 TB SAN.
Granted, you have a few less than others, but it's worth giving a shot
to other employees, give the proceeds to Charity.
There really just a waste of company space and time.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Would be a super generous donation, but if you honestly don't have a practical idea, perhaps donate to your local Free Geek chapter? Good drives at that size could help in the fight for bringing technology to those who couldn't afford it otherwise.
http://mediagoblin.org/
Ebay and use the revenue to buy a few very large size drives. Running a ton of tiny drives on standby all the time just makes no sense from both a power and heat standpoint.
http://www.thementoringctr.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=pages.Digital&
Im sure you could donate the hard drives to them and get a tax writeoff...or
find something similar in your community
ebay?
With almost a hundred hard drives, the gold leaf discs inside them must really add up in weight. What's gold trading at now? $850 or something per ounce.
Admit it. You post strawman arguments as AC so you get modded Insightful for refuting them, rather than Troll
i can't imagine the power to run 100 hard drives. recycle the hard drives and buy a drobo, 4TB at your fingertips.
If I were staring at 100 hard drives and several unused computers I would have the same urge to make them do something cool/useful. But fight it and get rid of them to charity or ebay. You aren't using them because they are useless to you.
Seriously, disk space is dirt cheap these days.
You won't save much using those and may cost a lot more when you deal with replacing them as they die.
Send them to charity, the recycling bin, or e-bay.
It is very unlikely that you can find an effective way to power them, control them, and aggregate them that would be cheaper than a couple of 1 Terabyte SATA-II drives from Best Buy for $259 each.
freenas + old motherboard + all pci slots full of cheap IDE cards.
works great, dont bother with IDE drive size versus Motherboard/Bios as freenas does not use the bios.
I have made a couple of 2TB arrays from less than a couple hundred bucks and a bunch of free 250gb hard drives.
You can do a software raid5 which gives you some peace of mind.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Have you considered Coraid's offerings? It doesn't matter how you slice/dice this problem... 100 disks will be expensive to link up. It might serve you a bit better to group the drives by speed and size then you can build individual boxen using various commodity components. You'll just need some add-in cards that support ATA RAID.
donate them to an artist. some burning man type sculptors
with 1TB drives for $175, i cant imagine the time it takes to string together 100 drives would be worth it.
good luck tho
I can't imagine the storage is worth the time to set up something that can use them all given new 500GB drives They are probably most useful in cheap USB to IDE enclosures as additional external storage - nice for convenient system backups, offsites, and extra storage.
you will just waste money on the power supply.
it's cheaper to buy terrabyte satas and raid them to do the same thing. i bet your array wouldn't even be that large.
we have ours physically shredded - that way security and utility are maximized as they are recycled.
They aren't worth jack except to you as playthings. You can't build up any worthwhile box to hold them, being IDE.
I take off the circuit boards and shoot them, then pick up the pieces for the trash. Got a half dozen waiting to be "wiped" as soon as I get around to it.
Infuriate left and right
There are several good reasons not to employ these as a backup solution. Using lots of smaller capacity drives will use significantly more power than fewer, larger drives. Also, these drives are old, which increases the probability that they will fail as they move along the bell curve. Save yourself the headache and powerbills, and donate 'em.
Destroy them. If they stored what you describe, you do not want proprietary information leaking out. Especially, if you are the one that is in charge of "doing something with said HD's". Safer to destroy them.
Of course, all slashdotters would say either build an array or donate. In reality, the company should keep the biggest for desktop usage and shred the rest.
Safer for you and the company in terms of liability.
Pry them open, remove those awesomely strong magnets, and stick them all over some douchebag's Hummer.
Oh, come on. iSCSI... ATAoE is one of those really horrible ideas that should have never made it out of some geek's basement when there was a standards-track solution already available. I'd take them apart and use the magnets for an art project -- and use money you've saved from NOT running all of those ancient drives and buy a few modern 1TB ones.
With the low price of current new 1TB HDs, I think your project will cost more than buying new hardware (I may be wrong).
So I suggest building some enormous speaker arrays with the drives, as e.g. demonstrated in this video of Radiohead's Nude (the hard drive array kicks in around 1'40").
Building instructions.
Another demo.
A hundred old hard drives stood up on a wall!
A hundred old drives on a wall!
BANG!
Ninety-nine old hard drives....
I got a $20 enclosure with 17 drive bays in it, and a 300W power supply. I've got a dozen SATA drives, each drawing under 10W, and 5 EIDE, drawing under 20W each.
At first I just got a dozen SATA/EIDE USB slaves for $10 each, and plugged them all into a USB hub, with just the single USB cable stretching out of the case over to another full PC's USB socket. But that is so slow, especially when copying big music or video files between drives (and through the single USB cable to the CPU and back). Playing multiple media files to different terminals in my house is too much bandwidth for the single USB, too. Running 4 USB from the big enclosure to the 4 sockets in the server PC isn't much better, because it all goes through the same CPU and PCI bus.
So I got 3 Sabrent SBT-SRD4 4xSATA controller PCI cards, because they were $25 each. But when I tried to boot them in a few different motherboards (pre-HP Compaq P3/1.2GHz, IBM P4/3.2GHz), none of them got past the POST to even start booting the OS. I want to use them with Linux, but with the failure to even boot I'm not hopeful about driver support, either.
I bought them from CompUSA (still alive, online only), which hasn't replied to (email only - no phone available) tech support requests. Nor has Sabrent itself. I'm not hopeful that they'll refund my money, since everything else about this transaction has sucked.
So what I want to know is what cheap motherboard (no need for graphics or anything else other than at least 3 PCI slots and 100Mb-1Gb ethernet) will work with these SATA cards? If they're really duds, what is the cheapest way to get 12 SATA drives controlled, even if they're not that fast, over to 100Mb/Gb ethernet? Either SATA cards + motherboard, or even a fat mobo with a dozen SATA ports. I'd even settle for just 4-8 SATA ports to get started. I'm talking under $200 if possible.
Ideas? If it works, then 8-9 of them should support the 100 HDs the original question was asking about.
--
make install -not war
One idea I've been tossing around in the back of my head for a while is a backup-to-disk device which is kind of a cross between a tape library and a raid enclosure. It would emulate a tape robot and drives so that normal backup software could talk to it, and would just power up drives as they are needed and read/write to them. The advantages are that there is no expensive robot with moving parts, only a few drives need to be powered up at once, the drives will probably last longer if they stay off most of the time, "tape seeks" would stay nearly instant, and you don't need RAID controller ports for every drive you have (just a switching fabric for routing the ports you have to the drives you want to talk to.)
It'd probably only be practical with SATA or SAS (fewer wires and availability of multiplexing chips).
Maybe someone can do me a favor and steal my idea so I can buy some hardware like this fairly soon. :)
First thing I would do is sort them by their capacity. Anything under 100gb isn't really worth using as their capacity versus power consumption is poor. Either throw them out, give them away or sell them in bulk lots on ebay. Next thing to do is either buy multi port ata cards which are increasingly harder to find/expensive or get ata-to-sata converters and use multi port sata cards. Multi port sata cards can be had in 16 or even 24 ports and three or four cards in a single system could give you a serious storage platform. Plus sata equipment is cheap and esata enclosures, cables and adapters can easily be had for a few dollars.
Also consider ata-sata adapters will enable you to use a port multiplier that will split one sata port into five. On newegg you can buy a Supermicro eight port sata card for about $100. So with eight fan out bridges you have the ability to host forty drives on one card. Eighty with two cards in a single machine. It wont be a fast server thats for sure but it will do the job.
As for software I like MDADM on Linux but you want to scale up with iata or iscsi. I haven't used iata/iscsi but assemble your drives into arrays and get them up and online. Then install your iata/iscsi packages and get them talking to your servers.
Yes, these strong little magnets are cool. I have a bunch of them and wonder how to keep them, so that they keep their strength.
Do magnets loose strength over time? I had the impression they do. But what factors influence this?
I think this is how Google started. Throw in some other random hardware and wait for the VC to come rolling in!
Pull them apart, and use the magnets to make a magnetic rail gun. Or some other fun game. There has to be a lot of fun (and destruction) in 200 ceramic magnets.
Even if you could scrounge up a bunch of old Parallel IDE quad-port Promise cards (pretty hard to do anymore, they were pretty rare even when they were in production) you can usually only get a max of three of those cards to work in a typical legacy PCI mobo due to various chipset and hardware resource conflicts. That gives you 12 IDE ports on the cards, plus two on the mobo, and at two drives (master + slave) per port, you would have a max of 28 possible drives connected and that's it.
Better have a heck of a power supply to feed 28 hungry old legacy IDE PATA drives and some fans to keep them all cooled.
*blam*
"I love my data!"
But you could make a hard disk generator I've seen several designs and some are better than others, but there isn't a great way to string out hundreds of IDE drives without a cluster and multiple processors. After weeding out a number of the large drives for storage, it may be a fun project to mess around with.
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
I haven't given thought to the hardware side, and the logistics of physically connecting the drives, but once you do, have you thought of using something like VMware that will allow you to virtualize the drives into one (up to 2 TB per .vmdk) virtual drive? Then, using a VMware virtual machine you could then access the virtual storage. Dunno if this helps...
Give everyone some tools and some batteries, and see who can make the best drag racer out of the parts.
Not a typewriter
I could use a 300 GB drive or two.
would be nice to see how they run with ZFS, figure it's as good a reason as any :p
I'll put them to the best use there is: porn.
skeet shooting
there may be more value in the data than in the drive mechanism itself. you said they were used for video production...maybe there are some interesting outtakes or bloopers your employer would allow on youtube.
I spent last weekend wiping a stack of hard drives I'd accumulated so I can be charitable. They range from 500mb to 15gb. Guess it's a matter of opinion (and needs, as you point out) what is "too small".
:-D
And Tumbleweed [ http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=583611&cid=23786219 ], we can share the 1gb SCSI that sounds like a jet engine and 600mb Compaq IDE that clicks like a card in bike spokes... I haven't been skeet shooting since I was 15.
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
This really made me laugh!
I have actually two modded xboxes at home. They work great as media centres.
You could build a climbing suit for climbing steel, build a generator,....
Engineering is the art of compromise.
You can use SATA port multipliers to put many disks on a single PC. Each port multiplier allows you to plug 5 disks on a single eSATA port. You can find cheap PCI SATA controllers with 4 eSATA ports. If you can find a PC with 5 PCI slots, that's a hundred disk.
Here are the ones I use on my NAS:
- port multiplier: http://www.addonics.com/products/host_controller/ad5sapm-e.asp
- SATA controller (PCI-X but works on PCI slots): http://www.addonics.com/products/host_controller/ads3gx4r5-e.asp
You also need one IDE to SATA bridge per disk. Maybe in bulk you can get good prices.
setup some Hard Drive Dominos, and post the video on youtube.
I would call your local data recovery service as they sometimes are interested in buying old drives of no particular size to use the controller cards on them.
Apparently, a lot of failed hard drives are not bad because of their physical platters, but because of the drive logic. These places need old drives for replacement controllers that you probably can't buy from the manufacturer.
ft
Firewire ZFS Put them in firewire boxes and RAID them together with ZFS. IIRC firewire supports 64 devices per bus. I'm not sure if a dual connector card would have two busses or one.
Life's a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Pick the largest and buy up as many usb or firewire interfaces and drop them in a tower case with a psu for the HD's (get bus powered usb/firewire interfaces) and have a decent sized external array...
or use the larger ones as customer throwaways - when the video needs to go to the customer and its really big - ship them a cheap usb/firewire enclosure with a disc in it loaded with their video - if it doesn't come back then you've got more to spare....
Life is but a Beta test...
I think what you're looking for is something like the Drobo, but like me you would prefer it were a rack mountable 14+ drive enclosure. More like a cross between the Drobo and perhaps an Apple / Promise RAID unit.
Play around with the Drobo configurator on their website - it's interesting. Seems like four drives really don't open up the usefulness of their system. I'm sure the more drives there are the more effective it would be.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
Giant domino rally
Freecycle
eBay.
Just keep in mind these are *STRONG* magnets. When you take it apart the magnets may smash into each other. This could send particles flying away in a direction that, according to Murphy, is where your eyes are. I know this by experience, lucky for me I wear glasses. And if some of your flesh is between the magnets, it's painful.
I'm actually thinking that it's a waste of effort. If they average, say, 100Gb each, then 100 drives means 10TB. 10TB these days is worth what? $2'000.00 worth of 1TB drives? Even less? More like $1'700.00 or so -- and that's for brand new drives, faster, better, more reliable, modern technologies, SATA, etc etc etc. Power consumptions too.
By the time you're done connecting all of these, and powering them, and cooling them, and dodging the broken ones, and finding a good use for it, and controllers to run them all, I can't imagine you'll be saving many dollars for storage, if any. Not to mention your time -- although it would be fun to spend.
So in the end, you'll have all of the benefits of a massive raid solution, but it'll be expensive to build, expensive to run, and take up a rediculous amount of world space (the real storage requirement).
I don't think they can compete as functioning hard drives. I think you should use them for some other purpose -- like art, or coasters, or to hold up your table.
For example, I have about 500 issues of national geographic from the 80's. They even have those file volume collection thingies so ten get held tegother as a set. I have some rediculous number like 50 sets. These things are totally useless to me -- unlike my nintendo power issues from the '80s that my mother sold about fifteen years ago -- so I got a piece of nice glass, and now have a coffee table that sits on these magazines instead of on legs. It's a nice piece of furniture from which you can reach in a pull out a blast from the past as you sip that coffee.
> Now, I'd never use such an array for critical data storage,
Why not - Google do for GFS. Indeed, I worked for a search engine company and wrote something that had significant similarities to GFS - that is, a distributed high-performance redundant file system. Of course, you still need a machine for every 4 drives, but it can be done. Still requires manual maintenance however - the chance of individual drive failure if you run lots of them becomes quite high (your data is safe due to redundancy). Look around the net for references to GFS and Google data centers.
I have more than 100 matchbox SCSI external cases also with drives. They need a home.
Why not just use the largest 10 or 20, and leave the rest of 'em in the closet for now?
Either your 10-20 drive pilot project will be a raging success, and your boss will be beating down your door to get the other drives plugged in, or it'll prove to be a huge waste of time, in which case you'll be glad you didn't bother with the smaller drives.
Maybe have a go at a cluster filesystem. GlusterFS has been around for quite a while, however I have been using ceph stably for about a month now and it is amazing.. mind you it is still in the testing stages its worth checking out http://ceph.newdream.net/ .
Generally speaking, time alone will not reduce the strength of a permanent magnet. Heat, vibration, magnetic flux, and other forms of energy exposure can weaken permanent magnets. But in a box in your cabinet they are unlikely to encounter any sufficiently strong energy source to have a significant impact.
ZFS Pool them. Network them somehow.
These sizes are still useful for putting in external USB enclosures and using as a laptop backup drive (with something like Ghost).
Someone who for the trade of taking some of the other junk hardware off your hands (the company may pay a fee in here somewhere, but its the responsible thing to do) he will give you a stack of identical old hp's, with ata 133 cards for each, and even an extra nic so they can all be channel bound... Think of the power if you have 8 2 ghz hp desktops sitting in a channel bound stack with 8 drives a piece in them? Then just make all of them boot off the same linux image, or do seven hard drives and a modded Ubuntu live cd in each and your ready to rock!
Like arts? Like cheesy little Indie mags? Check out www.artwerkmag.com, and don't laugh at the bad coding please.
Get out that 12-gauge pump shotgun, a bunch of shells, perhaps some friends, and head for the range....
Recycle them in some environmentally responsible fashion.
Old drives = worthless
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of... Nevermind.
Load them up with all kinds of pr0n, then scatter them throughout the offices of auditors/beancounters/CEOs/local politicians/whoever else is getting on your nerves lately.
Programmer: an ingenious device that converts caffeine into code.
I saw this a while ago, but never got bored enough to try.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fp4jQNa_9sY&feature=related
They don't
USB to IDE controllers are cheap ($5 buy-it-now on ebay). USB 2.0 hubs are cheap (7 port $10). USB PCI controller cards are cheap. PC power supplies are cheap, use the 4 pin molex fanout cables to get as many connectors as the supply will support drives. Something like 100 USB IDE adapters, 15 hubs, 4 quad USB pci cards, and 10 power supplies should cover you.
Should get you going for under $10/drive. You'd end up with about 20T of unreliable storage for $1000, but man it will be cool. (Note: You won't fit on a single 15A 120v circuit, plan for multiple circuits.)
You can put all of the drives on the same linux machine. I'd recommend you use LVM and some sort of raiding.
Cases will blow your budget, you might think about just screwing them between some vertical steel straps.
Look, it's not worth trying to hook them all up and get the equivalent of two or three modern hard drives' space. But pull them apart and get the cool rare-earth magnets out of them.
Do you have ESP?
Then you'd just need 25 drobos.
Check out ioquake3.org for a great, free, First-Person Shooter engine!
Well, I've always wanted to make a mass hard drive back plane thing for old drives. Do something liket ake a 5U rack mount drawer, put a backplain on the BOTTOM, build seperators and mounting stuff, and then find some source of hot swap trays, to mount vertically. Probably using a lot of IDE to SATA converters, which are unfortunately expensive. Then SATA multipliers. Then Linux LVM and MD. My main problem is I'd need to actually engineer the backplane and stuff by myself, and I don't have the EE experience to do it.
You can buy a bunch of usb dongles, usb 2.0 pci adapters, and some duct tape, you can build a kick ass freenas server.
That number of drives will make one awesome ZFS storage pool. In which case you could make mission critical storage with it.
Typical Rare Earth magnets have a maximum temperature of 150F. Other than abuse, heat or water getting inside the outer shell . . . magnets have a very long life.
A lot of our donated computers don't come with hard drives, so we're always in need of hard drives more than just about anything else.
We wipe all drives to DoD standards before ever putting them in anything, too. (Well, anything other than the machines we use to wipe 'em.)
If you don't want to ship them all the way to Eugene, there's lots of other charities that do the same kind of thing, and probably have the same disproportionate computer to hard drive donation ratio.
If the masses can keep you down, you're not the Ubermensch.
Send them to one of the services that recycles systems from businesses for schools and disadvantaged families.
A lot of corporations are afraid that their systems contain priveledged info but since yours had large chunks of decompressed video, most of which has liscencing attached and has been released, you are in a unique position to provide HDs.
500 GB Hd's cost $100 buy 4, donate the smaller drives, and save the recyclers thounsands of dollars.
-D
Sorry but if you are serious your steps should be.
1. Call a recycler and dump the drives. smaller than 200GB (keep the largest ones to give out to other employees for their home systems)
2. Buy 2 or 3 1TB HDD's
3. Install them in a box.
4. Done.
Start with the shear cost the additional equipment, then add in the cost of the electricity to run the drives and their controller. then add in the cost of HVAC to keep the room they are in cool. Will by far exceed the cost of 2 or 3 1TB drives. Not to mention the cost of your time to build, deploy and maintain.
In short. Nothing you can do with these drives will save your employer money. However proper recycling might bring in a buck or two. Not to mention the good will when you hand the largest drives to fellow employees to use at home.
I'm sorry, I'm to tired to be witty at the moment so this message will have to do.
You'll have to speak British to get this.
Windows Home Server lets you hook up any number of heterogeneous drives and it treats them all as one logical partition and automatically does backup between them.
Let's say the average size is 100GB, that means you have 10,000GB, or 10TB of storage. You can do 10TB of storage with 10 drives, which will use 10% of the energy of the 100 drives you have. You'll also be using new drives and have a lower probability of failure.
Assuming you sell the drives for $20 each, you can probably get close to 10TB of new storage for $2k, although I haven't checked prices lately.
You can never have enough hard drive clocks.
Remove the covers (expose the platters) and hang them from the walls of your cube as decorations, like Kevin Mitnick's character in the movie Takedown. Any other use would be a pitiful waste.
(Every self respecting nerd must know what I'm talking about, right?)
Lord of the Rings cosplay pron. If you haven't seen 'Shire Backdoor Freaks', you don't know what you're missing!
Find a computer minded NGO and get them send to Africa. Getting usable spare parts in East-Africa is a mayor problem. A shipload of drives would really help.
One hundred drives, drawing 10W or more each (older drives were a bit more power-hungry, nowadays they're a bit under 10W) makes for 1000W. At $0.10/kWh that's $876/year. Add the power consumption of the other hardware you'll need to attach them to, and you'll surely be over $1000/year in energy costs, not to mention the purchase cost of said hardware.
:j
You said 100 drives ranging 20-300GB... that doesn't tell us much about the total capacity, but let's say it's 10TB. A terabyte disk costs less than $200 these days, a 4-port SATA PCI card can be had for $40, so with two of those and the 2 SATA ports on any cheap mobo you have a system that'll serve up your 10TB for $2000, two years of just the energy cost of your 100 disc system.
And that's not counting the headache of building your 100 disk array, the maintenance cost, and the reduced capacity due to inevitable failures with such a large number of older discs.
In short, although a cool project in theory, in practice it's not worth it today. A few years ago it would have been, but the price of storage has just dropped too steeply in the last couple of years.
I work with a group that "recycles" old machines in a developing country to provide access to young people who couldn't afford it otherwise, and even here, with free (donated) hardware it's hard to beat the falling price/performance curve of computer hardware these days. Although we could use your discs... discs (and memory) are shortest in supply. If you want to donate them to us, drop me a line.
Just run Darik's Boot and Nuke on the drives, then sell or donate them. You probably can't make much use out of them as-is, so why not give them away or make some profit?
If you're going to donate/dispose of them, use ATA Secure Erase. It's part of the drive's firmware, truly secure and much faster than a 7-pass overwrite.
You can access this firmware capability here:
http://cmrr.ucsd.edu/people/Hughes/HDDErase.zip
Also, if you want to try to make an array, 3Ware has some interesting IDE RAID devices to try. They have a 12-port adapter for $600.
I'll take it!
WTF? Who are you? These drives (I assume) came from desktop PCs. You say you keep them in antistatic bags. They *still* hold data. Maybe that data is not security critical but it is compilance critical.
What you should do is either destroy them - you can buy disk destroying machines (but DO install them in the cellar). Such machines will literally shred them to pieces - great stuff for health-dangerous confetti at the party.
You can also wipe them out - but keep in mind that procedure would mean like fewteen hours of processing per disk (an all maintainance of operator).
Really - just WTF? No responsibility, no security policies. Just plain horror.
And I come from post soviet countries and still your attitude for the matter scares me...
We refurbish computers and put them in the homes of low-income people, nonprofits, churches, senior centers, etc. We always need drives, and late-model computers to keep our refurbishers busy. We are a nonprofit and feel that this is an important way to bridge the digital divide.
I don't know where you're located, but we would love to have those drives, and will wipe them to Mil-spec and reuse them. that keeps them out of landfills (good for the environment) and puts good computers into the homes and tech centers of low-income communities (good for our communities and your kharma). We'll pay shipping if you would like to donate them to us.
Check us out on the web at www.ReliaTech.org. and give me a call at 510 236-7000 to discuss donating those drives and/or computers.
By the way, that donation gives you a tax deduction, too.
thanks!
Ben
...to me.
Please? If not me, you can probably donate them to some charity .
Anyone else think the comments just weren't rendering right before they turned off ABP and saw ads?
Sometimes there's nothing to be gained by holding on to outdated technology. Daisy chaining the drives together only ensures that at some point, you'll have a failure somewhere in the line. It's far more economical IMHO to recycle the drives - free geek, Ebay or your state recycling program. In California, the Goodwill thrift store chain is an authorized recycler of computers and electronic components, meaning you can drop off your outdated tech items and they actually benefit, as the state reimburses them for this service.
Replace the drives with a single terabyte drive (unbelievable, isnt it?) or a couple of 500 GB external drives. The latter are available at Staples and Office Depot for less than $200, and on sale have been under $100 recently.
Two solution:
* Wipe the drives then donate them to charity. Plan on a few hours per 10 GB for a good wipe.
* Physically destroy the drive then have fun with the pieces. Unless you are going to destroy the platters completely I recommend at least a 1-pass 0-overwrite.
Ways to have fun physically destroying the drive:
* Heat: Thermite never looked so cool!
* Chemistry: What happens when iron mixes with NODON'TDOTHATYOU'LLBLOWITUP
* Physics: Hey kids, let's see what sandpaper does to metal!
As for the pieces, you can do arts and crafts, have cow-chipping, er, I mean drive-tossing contests, use them as props in the next company improvised-comedy day, or whatever.
When you are done, you can sell the metal for scrap.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Inspired by this thread, I have been thinking about some AoE designs.
My current single channel IDE design consists of
DM9000B + ATmega 8515 + GAL16V8
As the harddisk and the ethernet chip can be made to basically talk directly to each other (with the GAL doing the MDMA handshake), it should be possible to nearly saturate 100Base-T. The ethernet chip can do jumbo frames as well.
To now expand this to several channels, one just has to follow the recommentations about "dual port cabling" from the ATA standard. You can find it as well in Annex C.2.8 of the ATA 4 draft. Given enough drivers and multiplexers, a lot of channels should be possible. One has to weigh the cost of these drivers/multiplexers against the cost and additional bandwidth of more units.
Old small CPLDs might be an alternative to GAL+multiplexer+driver.
It would be impractical to provide power and IDE controllers for 100+ drives simultaneously, but if you're mechanically handy, you could create a robotic handler to insert up to four drives into a standard PC, using off-the-shelf removable drive cases.
Maybe you could do something like this video? Unfortunately, I cannot access the site from work but the link description is "Video of old computer hardware playing Radiohead song," and the author uses a bunch of old harddrives as a type of primitive speaker.
Treat every day like it's your last; delete your browser cache before going to bed.
I'm sure this is a great de-stresser:
http://www.edrsolutions.com/
If you've got a bunch of old cases that you can get your hands on then you might be able to do something useful.
1) Don't expect to use the smaller drives - turn the platters into coasters!
1) (a) If some of them are 7200rpm drives (or raptors), you could roll them out to individual workstations as swap space
2) Get all the 3.5" enclosures out of the old cases, attach together, put into some sort of sturdy frame. Voila, lots of 3.5" drive space. Find a motherboard which has 2 IDE connectors and as many PCI slots as you can find. And get stuffing them with IDE controllers. Now, you need a motherboard with a pci-express slot as well, and either onboard graphics or onboard gigabit LAN. Try for the former as onboard network adapters are notoriously flakey. You then get a PCI-express dual, or quad, channel network adapter.
With 4 PCI slots and the onboard controllers, you now have 10 IDE controllers = 20 drives (+1 new SATA drive for the system to run on). Pick the 20 best drives and fit those to your shiny drive rack. (If you don't fancy that, buy a new case, though I can't find any that will fit more than 18 drives (a Lian-Li), don't forget to get internal enclosures to fit extra drives in 5.25" bays). You'll also need to get a beefy power supply.
3) Do some totting up an realize that the whole scheme has cost substantially more than buying a bunch of new drives.
A few of the bigger drives may be good for medium storage requirements; see if you can buy your employer out of them if you want to build a MythTV box at home; but other than that, I'd say that you've saved yourself a turkey. Which is the basic rule of thumb when saving any consumer-grade hardware
FGD 135
You can get a bunch of firewire to ide bridge boards, and run scsi over firewire.
Keep in mind this will be noticeably slower than native ide once you get more than a certain number of drives on a single bus, but for some applications, fast disk access isn't as important.
Technically speaking, you can use USB for this too, however there are many more downsides.
Many times slower than firewire, due to the method usb uses to communicate bidirectionally.
Its not that much cheaper, and also you cant use nearly as many drives per bus.
As an example, try http://www.fwdepot.com/
Their prices are a bit high i admit, but you can build a shopping list there and look around for best price.
4 BUS firewire cards. Note that a 4 -port- card is not at all the same. That will be one bus, with a 4 port hub built in. The less drives on each bus, and the more buses you have, the more bandwidth is available to each disk, and the speed up is exponential.
One bridge board per hard drive, a few hubs and some cabling, and spread them out over your few spare pcs.
Then run something like http://evms.sf.net/ to cluster the machines together and create one giant pool of storage space out of all the drives over all the machines.
It's probably as cheap as possible for getting use out of them storage wise. Any other 'better' solution will cost a lot more too.
Of course, useful for storage and just plain useful are two different metrics.
A lot of others already mentioned donating them.
Just remember to hook 4 up at a time to a spare pc and run a good HD wipe app like http://dban.sf.net/
But there are many options to get rid of them to others with.
Charity donations for a tax write off, local community projects in need of hardware, friends, family, stocking stuffer for the staff, make a craigslist post and offer them for free (or next to), buyer comes to get it or pays shipping, do the ebay dance, etc etc
How can we change the culture to include recycling and more important, component reuse? Do you have any idea the work and materials it takes to build these things? Just because it is common doesnt mean it isnt expensive in real terms. I say wise up and move on from extract - create - dump product cycles. *sigh*
Besides the time you've wasted thinking about it, there are 160+ comments on this story resulting in probably near $10k in lost engineering person-hours. Seriously, into the trash with them.
If they have to be like fridge leftovers, and sit in a pile until the guilt diffuses out of them, OK, but dont dwell on it.
If it helps to let go, give them a purpose discarding them... load them with porn, put some in the bosses trash, and call HR. Bury them all behind the competitions offices and call the EPA. Load them with Google Earth images of military bases, distribute them to 100 Chinese restaurants, and call Homeland Security. Or just fill them with random file names with random data and mail to the NSA for decryption.
Or, like, seriously, throw them away.
If the security of the data is really important, you can only destroy them, but if the data on it is not something that is really worth worrying about, I would look at selling them to retro computer users. I know the old Amigas have something like a 4 gig usable size limit. Many of the people using them, hate the idea of putting in a 500 gig drive just to use 4 of it. I assume that some of the other old machines have similar restrictions.
You can save on buying 100 baseballs buy using hard drives! Just don't bean the batter! Ouch!
Or duct-tape 5 together and you have 20 soccer balls! Just don't juggle it on your head! Painful!
Or you could use them as Frisbees! 100 Frisbees! How far can you throw it?! Challenge your friends!
"Now, I'd never use such an array for critical data storage, but it certainly would be useful as a massive backup array to our existing SAN that does store critical data."
You mean "would not," right? You want your massive backup array to be reliable when you need it...
Check the warranties, 5 or 6 or 10? years. Assume they have a problem and get warranty replacements. Use those instead of drives from the pile.
If the pile is still growing, make a plan to track every new drive, and manage its path. If a replaced works and isn't or won't be needed for another machine, configure it as a second drive, to get some use out of it instead of growing a pile that just sits there...
At this point, scrub the data and give them away to other company employees who want them for their home machines. First come, first.
A Data Destruction Service will contract to safeguard the data and destroy it during recycling of valuable materials.
If you stack them vertically and apply pressure from all known six dimensions, you wjll travel jnto another unjverse
Have you fscked your local propeller head today?
http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1797936/
http://www.nextsteprecycling.org/home.php
...
A search for "nextstep" on google may turn up a location near you.
Most of the equipment here came from Nextstep.
Computers, drives, hubs, switches , etc
A decent IT shop will have a policy of wiping drives if they're operational when they're taken out of commission and tagging them as wiped. I work in government and this is routine procedure for us.
If the drive doesn't work, it's shredded.
Take them apart. The pure platters are extremely usefull for all kinds of stuff. If you add thick felt to one side using doulb-sided carpet tape you'll have luxury coasters that go/sell well as avantgarde accessoire.
The aluminum distance rings are great for all kinds of purposes such as (but not limited to) replacing broken, bad, cheap D-rings on outdoor equiment, high tech juwelery, key rings, rope thimbles, etc. Replace all your plastic d-rings and ladderlocks on your baggage gear with those and it will look tres chic and much cooler.
The magnets are usefull for all sorts of creative non-sense, such as deleting the platters (and credit cards), building motors, etc.
The torx screws may be handy for someone who needs that sort of sizes.
And last but not least the casings and such are valuable raw materials that can be recycled. Seperate and collect the controllers too. The electronics contain gold and other precious substances that special shops recycle aswell.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I have made wind chimes, 5.5" platter on the top five to six 3.5" platters, and the spacer rings as the striker all tied together with fishing line or twisted pair.
Another time, I have used an oxy/acetylene torch to melt them for fun, (http://youtube.com/watch?v=oOIf0JmZfrQ)and later to make cast aluminum bottle openers (they almost worked!)
I have also heard of people making wind generators out of the magnets on a brake drum or other rotor, usually encased in epoxy. The blades are another matter... http://www.theworkshop.ca/energy/hdgen/hdgen.htm
After removing all the magnets platters, and circuit boards you could sell the aluminum for a scrap at enough to pay for all the beer you drank taking them apart! Today it would bring you $1.30 a pound, not worth it for one but 200 might be worth it.
...turn the lot into a bulky and noisy 1 kW room heater. Remember to have an air gap between all drives to allow for air circulation.
1 kW may not be enough to keep you warm during winter, but it may help you survive if every other heat source fails.
freegeek.org will put them to good use. It's a 501(c)(3) so donations will result in a tax break, and they will go into PCs reloaded w/ Ubuntu and donated to schools & other non-profits. Some machines (laptops, mostly) are sold in the Thrift Store to keep the lights on and pay the rent, and some go to volunteers to keep them motivated, but the vast majority go to worthy causes. Anything which doesn't run is recycled responsibly.
There is nothing wrong with yr Internet. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling the transmission - NSA
Our organization has a similar problem. It would be nice if we had a "file farm" where older drives could be just plugged into it in a modular fashion to act like a giant file server. And some kind of redundant or auto-backup would be nice. Being that they are older drives, they're bound to have a few problems.
Table-ized A.I.
-b
myselfmusic
You could always turn them into musical instruments, like this guy did, using "vintage computing hardware including a Sinclair ZX Spectrum (rhythm & lead), Epson LX-83 dot matrix printer (drums), HP Scanjet 4c (bass) and a hard drive array to mangle vocals and effects."
I was thinking about the same problem.
Is there a cheap way of doing it ?
A guy asked a serious question about how to make use of a significant amount of hardware sitting around gathering dust, and what does he get? A bunch of juvenile, smart-assed answers. I think most people just use this bored in an attempt to show everyone else how "smart" they are by being a sarcastic and assinine as possible.
At about $200AU a TB for new sata drives (with warranty) that means you are going to have to be salvaging ~500 gig of reliable and tested space per hour.
Bugger that off. Dump the lot in salvage for a few k, and buy new kit.
With the US economy tanking and the price of hardware at rock bottom, you'd be crazy to even be considering secondhand gear.
3laws: No freebies, no backsies, GTFO.
I would use ZFS and create a massive zpool, or several small raidZ-2 zpools, and create some very reliable secondary storage.
Works great for obsolete arrays that used to use (Veritas) volume management. It extends the life expectancy of old
storage hardware and gives you some practice on a next generation file system.
Make a bunch of chess sets out of the various parts.
Something like this.
http://www.novica.com/itemdetail/index.cfm?pid=121771
The platters of could serve as the white squares maybe?
Ha ha -- 100 drives. Imagine the "theoretical" possibility of sitting on 100,000 drives.
What then?
You've mentioned ATAoE, but have you thought about throwing LVM over top of a bunch of them and serving them over iscsi using Iscsi Enterprise Target? You could use Microsoft free iscsi initiator or one of the many Linux implementations.
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
if i were u, id sell them for a few hundred bucks, and go free some slaves ....
....and you be happy knowin that you had turned a pile of useless crap into something priceless .....
http://matador.org/10-shocking-facts-about-global-slavery-in-2008/
Disk based backup solutions are worth the effort, so I can see why you're leaning this way. Unfortunately, trying to utilize ~100 PATA drives for this is going to give you nightmares for ages. Find a way to reclimate them for cash, either directly or indirectly. Hell, you can donate them to charity for a tax writeoff if you like (just make sure you DoD wipe the disks first). Take the reclimated capital and buy yourself a new data-deduplicated VTL, or a NearStor, or similar. Backup solutions need to have some level of trustworthiness to be useful, and I doubt you'll find that in a pile of aged PATA disk.
100 USB to IDE cables (maximum of 126 devices that can be connected to the same bus), and ZFS.
The standards for data sanitization is more stringent now. Anything that is more sensitive than Classified, and leaves the control of the organization disposing of the drives, needs to be either put through a degauser, chopped up into tiny pieces, or turned into slag. If the media is simply going to be re-used with-in the organization then wiping is okay.
Build a fort! (in case you didn't read the subject)
I have nothing compelling to say
But this sounds like a golden opportunity to try out ZFS and benchmark it using a large amount of old-ish commodity hardware. And get yourself a nice little storage center in the process. From what I understand, ZFS loves old disks.
When life gives you lemons, you CLONE those lemons, and make SUPER-LEMONS. -- Dr. Cinnamon Scudworth, Ph.D
Crack 'em open, separate the platters, you've got anywhere between 300 and 500 tiny disks that you can use to invent the sport of indoor skeet shooting. Yay, aluminum, ceramic, or glass pigeons!
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Size your filesystems to match the predominant size among your drives, and use them for offline FS backup. IE: I have a stack of 80GB drives here... So at my latest rebuild, I grew my /home to 80GB, and I use the drives to take a backup of my user data every month.
A USB-> Ide adapter that I got off of ebay saves me the trouble of cracking the case.
If I had 100 hard drives I wouldn't need tapes for a long time :)
My suggestion would be:
1. Get a large case, IDE controller cards and use the drives as NAS or SAN (I use hard drives this way, but only 7 of them, 2TB total)
2. If you do not need that much space at once, use the drives as tapes for backup or archiving. Fill the drive, the put it someplace safe (I use tapes for that since they are cheaper (per gigabyte) than hard drives).
When I see the suggestions of destroying working hard drives I can't stop thinking how some people have too much money...
Use a combination of IDE to USB2 converters and USB hubs to hook together all the drives into whatever ports the computer has. Perhaps a few of the drives could be ebayed to cover costs?
Helios just sent out a desperate plea for hard drives (and RAM) for a school that needs them for their hopeful conversion to Linux
http://linuxlock.blogspot.com/2008/06/standing-one-edge.html
Solaris' ZFS (BTW, Apple and FreeBSD ported ZFS to their own OSes) has the concept of storage pools. Perfect for lots of unreliable hard drives.
In fact, Sun's x4500 uses 48 off-the-shelf SATA hard drives for mission crtical storage.
Speaking of Tivo, the original poster's collection of drives sounds just right for increasing storage on a whole bunch of Series 1 and 2 Tivos.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
A solution we use is that of iSCSI + Sun's ZFS. You can distribute the drives in different boxes or off the shelf systems you have laying around, load iSCSI on all the boxes and use one host machine to initiate them all. Then use the ZFS file system which will allow you to pool multiple devices together (like a high efficient RAID) and you can create whatever size/distribution of file systems you want. You said your application was video production. iSCSI and ZFS have been used for this application and heavily documented: http://blogs.sun.com/constantin/entry/x4500_solaris_zfs_iscsi_perfect
get a few cheap usb adapters and let everyone know the drives are available for sneakernet duty
Frankly I don't see what how having a bunch of Vietcong after you would be a good thing.
"That's not a monopole! He's got a bunch of horseshoes and they're pointin' in the same direction!"
Make 100 copies and leave them all over the place. Now if you forget your SSN or credit card info, you can have easy access!
What you want to do would be more trouble then it was worth. Do what I do, take them "troubleshooting" and by "troubleshooting" I mean you take the trouble and you shoot it. Repeatedly. I use my local rifle range. (no overseers, it's a wonder nobody has died up there... yet)
if you want a simple, software-based quasi-raid and you're running *nix, try mhddfs - the only drawback is that it doesn't support splitting large files across multiple volumes (so it may not work for video production, depending on whether you've got a couple huge files or a bunch of smaller ones)
MS-DOS: Most Severe Denial of Service
Free Online Backup
I've heard too many IT guys advocate the destruction of old drives as the safest method of data privacy. I say bah hum bug.
Unless you work for the CIA, the information on your companies drives can be safely destroyed simply be zeroing the drive. After the drive has been zeroed, the drive isn't going to be able to read the information any longer, a simple fact.
Is the information still there? BARELY! Sure, a drive recovery center *might* be able to recover some data by removing the platters and examining them with highly sensitive equipment, but really, the cost is so prohibitive.
Who's going to spend several hundred dollars to maybe recover a few pieces of Cindy's calendar from 2003? Not even Cindy.
Zero the drives and give them to people who could use them.
640s cost $100 (due to the platter density I highly recommend the 640) whereas the 500s cost about 80 currently.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
AK-47. Hard drives make very fun targets for sufficiently powerful firearms. Shotguns not advised, unless firing slugs. Trust me on that.
--RIAmAses! Let my MP3ople go!
MogileFS? Yet to play with it as my boss shot me down for suggesting another time waisting project.
At most I know digg uses it.
"MogileFS is our open source distributed filesystem"
http://www.danga.com/mogilefs/
Just use shred(1) - it's in most Linux repositories including Ubuntu and Debian at least: shred -n10 -z /dev/sdg will shred the whole hard disk overwriting it 10 times, with last pass being zeroes.
Fill them with contraband media of various types and give them out to your users (and lusers). You could systematize it. If someone goes six months without "breaking" their computer by changing the settings, not liking it, and forgetting how to change them back, that person might get a 4-gig full of random music that you pulled off of Gnutella (or whatever). If a user goes a year without unintentionally creating a security risk, he gets 50 GB of unsorted porn. For the god of a man who has gone his entire career without a trouble ticket and is miraculously using ten-year-old hardware with no failures, you could have a 300 GB drive with all of the best video games, modern and classic.
And for the jackass who wants a new monitor because he changed the display resolution, tries out script-kiddie hacking tutorials on his coworkers, constantly demands faster equipment for him to do nothing with, looks at thumb drives he found in the parking lot, and gives up his password for a candy bar, you could stealthily replace his hard drive with a very small one containing Windows ME.
This space reserved for administrative use.
It would be more expensive to connect them all in any meaningful way than it would cost just to buy a rackmount SAS filer with a dozenish drive bays and 300gb drives.
IDE is cheap but you can only do 4 drives per controller card (2-ports per) and maybe 3 controller cards per motherboard. that's 16 drives per mobo. that's going to be the cheapest way to interface them. And it would be a huge pain in the ass to screw around with 7 systems and all those ribbon cables.
You could just buy 100 firewire cases and load them all up too, and try to get 20 firewire ports on one system and just chain the drives out to 5 levels deep. Not useful for performance but maybe you could have a big JBOD ftp server. but the little wall transformers for the drive chassis are going to be a nightmare.
Then you have to think about the power that any setup you do will waste. I think I recommend you just harvest the aluminum out of them and get maybe $200 for all scrap.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
why not try this:
http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1797936/
A buddy of mine made a media server with bunch of drives (8 I believe) on a single controller. The trick he used is that he switches on and off individual drives through a small PCB he made that uses a relay for switching power. Data connections for a bunch of drives are merged together. The board is controlled through the parallel which theoretically enables him to do 64 drives I hink (2 control signals and 6 for which drive to apply the command to). Small PCB and seems to work nice. So there is a strict setup routine which drives can be on/off managed on BSD through a perl script. One drive is allways on and used as a buffer disk. A script finds the file you're looking for using an Index, starts the drive, copies the file to the buffer disk and powers-off the drive again. Power-friendly solution as well ;-)
Why not send them to some help organization that can hand them out in some country where they can be of use?
Raid 0 like 4 to a workstation and use it as swap space for your applications.
It'll hopefully give you a boost on super-memory intensive applications.
cool video! I don't mind being rick rolled after seeing this... thanks.
There are some organizations that use spare hd, cpu, etc contributed by people to create PCs and send them to countries or places where are needed for free.
then sell it / blackmail people. ;-)
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
You can build a Google style filesystem with them that would perform very fast. Check out this opensource solution: http://hadoop.apache.org/core/ Good luck.
When all else fails, hire me!
1. get an ide/sata to usb connector. 2. backup all your favorite files,videos,music. 3. label the hard drives. 4. seal hard drives, store in attic. hard drives also make great geek gifts. i'd have kittens if someone gave me a spare hard drive.
On software side I used:
- uip (tcp/ip stack)
- a modified version of mmc from Procyon AVRlib
- Tiny FatFS
- A modified enc28j60 driver from Procyon AVRlib
I can see that Procyon AVRlib has a IDE/ATA driver too. I've never tested it and don't know if it works... But if it does it should be a pretty simple project.If it's something you want to play with there's a working uip port for atmega in this SVN repository:
http://code.google.com/p/avr-uip/
But as others mentioned I don't think a hundred 20-300GB disk are worth much... Storage costs next to nothing today, just take a look at Amazon S3.
I'd imagine that it'd be a lot easier and cheaper, both in terms of hardware and power consumption, to buy bigger disks.
Download the internet? 100 Hard drives should be more than enough!
There's a userspace AoE "server" that you can run on linux and export any block device (disk, lvm, md, dm, crypt, ...). It's available on sourceforge" along with some other nifty aoe related tools. My /home lives on vblade exported aoe device for more than a year now :)
While the power requirement to run all of these drives continuously would indeed be great, you don't necessarily need a back-up _array_ - instead, use them for off-line back-up media. A single PC equipped with a removable HDD enclosure or three would do the job nicely.
As it has become hard to get smaller hard drives, I suggest you sell them (wiped clean, of course) in working condition. If anyone wants to get the magnets, they can take the drives apart themselves...
But I do think that there are a lot of people who need to replace disks in simple Linux desktops, where 8 GB would suffice, and who'd rather take cheap old hard drives than Flash cards with adapters.
For a while I've been thinking about something similar on a personal scale. ;-)
Take a mainboard like this one (Via NAS 7800-15LST):
http://www.via.com.tw/en/products/mainboards/motherboards.jsp?motherboard_id=610
It's got 12 SATA connectors and two times GBit ethernet. Of course you'd need PATA to SATA connectors on each hard drive, at around 10 dollar each.
So, at around 1000 dollars already, as someone pointed out earlier, it's probably more economical to just buy a big new fast HD with lower power draw.
You'd still need at least 8 of these boards and probably some casing, PSUs and cables which makes the bill more likely above 2000 dollars.
Regarding the power draw... I think that shouldn't be too bad if used for backup, since the disks can be kept spun down most of the time.
While not economical for a business, for home use it might be a different situation. Especially if, like me, you don't have any real backup at all.
Put the mainboard with all your old HDs in your cellar, run ZFS on it, and voila, no worries about dying hard disks.
Only problem is you can't buy the mainboard as an end user. Oh well. Just wipe and donate them already
I had a friend who worked for the Hubble Space Telescope Institute in Baltimore. At the time (early 90's) he had a Silicon Graphics Onyx computer under his desk for graphics that were created for the Institute. He got it from the firing range at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. He was there one day visiting a friend and saw 20 Onyx computers on the firing range. He was shocked and asked "WHY???". They had been used for M1 Abrams tank designs and they wanted to destroy the computers because of the top secret info. I think they were worth hundreds of thousands of $$$ each - not sure. He explained that all they needed to do was pull out the hard drive and run it over with a tank. The officers said he could have one of the computers minus the drive and because orders were orders they blew up the remaining 19 computers.
Harddisk throwing contest in your village ?
The winner gets them all and can ask the same question.
Hanging meat lasts longer !
Here is what I would do: http://www.irongeek.com/i.php?page=videos/better-than-gutmann-dod-wipe :)
Just donate them to several schools for them to repair malfunctioning computers.
Or deliver them for recycling.
Lost engineering person-hours? How do you think we engineers learn? Just playing with problems like this. I've learned some interesting things in the 30 minutes I've been reading this thread.
I had a similar, if not smaller problem. It turned out that at a company I worked at, it was deemed easier to buy new drives than try to fix any corruption/trivial disk error, so they had about 50 drives. At least they didn't trash them or give them away with sensitive data, right?
Ok, so I would spend about 15 minutes a day setting up and running spinrite from http://www.grc.com/spinrite.htm on them. Some took just a few hours - others a few weeks. Over 80% of them were fixed with ZERO ISSUES remaining. There was no need to replace the disk, it was simply a lack of maintenance or logic error that made them appear broken. Not bad for a $89 software investment.
I have no affiliation with GRC other than as a satisfied customer.
What about using them for off-line backup? Anybody know how medium-sized (few 100GB) drives compare with tape and writable blu-ray in terms of cost/byte, shelf-life, and performance?
an application for the Beowulf cluster...
\yes, I'm posting as AC
Small drives have much lower data density, which equates to being much slower than new drives. I don't need much more than a few hundred GBs of space, but I'm still upgrading to much larger drives because of their speed.
I am using lots of firewire and usb external cases for such old drives, mostly for backups and archive storage. And with Linux's software RAID, different size nor sub-prime reliability of individual drives is not an issue.
There you are, staring at me again.
You could install the harddrives (like I did) into cheap one-touch backup cases (a-la StarTech, Buffalo, etc.) and put them on workstations.
Tell the users to just close out their apps and hit the button before they logout or during lunch and they can back up their documents and such.
I started a pilot with discarded drives where I work and it seems to be going well. I'm going to do a mass roll-out with the drives I have left over from old systems here pretty shortly.
-WarpKat
Any drive under 80-100GB probably isn't worth your time anymore, even as a donation or for eBay. But for the larger drives, either of those options is viable.
If you want a use for them in-house: instead of putting them on the network, why not put them in USB enclosures for local external storage. They wouldn't really be good for traveling due to their 3.5" form factor, but lots of laptops that are a couple of years old have only 80 GB drives, so these could be good for external backup drives. If they are too small for your video folks, your support teams (marketing, accounting, HR and the like) might still get some use out of them.
We are the 198 proof..
If you really want to use the drives, USB. There are fairly simple little plugs that will convert your IDE into a USB drive. Sure, the best interfaces will only be around 30 megs/second, but it will work. Alternatively, I hear that equivalent Firewire devices are faster, so that may be a better option.
Of course, I wouldn't touch anything smaller than 100 gigs myself, and really, anything smaller than 500 gigs probably isn't even worth it with 1TB drives running under $200 now.
If you have access to firearms, you can always put a few bullets through the drives as a somewhat-effective counter to most data recovery attempts.
I had between 30 - 40 hardrives from old computers. I like you wanted to do something with them but the time it would take to securely wipe them didn't sound appealing to me. So,,, Realizing that life is too short to run boot and nuke on each drive, I bought a good sledge hammer. Wrote "Harddrive eraser" on the side in silver sharpie and found a cinder block with not a flat top, but with protruding sides, kind of looked like an H. I stood the block upright, and placed each drive on top of the H shaped sides. Now the drives had about an inch space below them as they rested on the high sides of the block. It's kind of hard to describe,, Anyway, I stood back, stupidly didn't wear safety glass and took a whack. The drives bent into the opening creating a slight U shape. I was satisfied when I could see into the drive and see the platters were bent. I got pretty good after a few and with one strike snapped the casing bending the contents inside. I always turned it circuit board side up to destroy the electronics . I would have been nice to recycle the materials but I didn't know of a place that would take such a mixed bag of metals.
... = excellent mini-trebuchet ballast.
we're doomed...
For the words to appear, the material separating the magnets from the iron filings would have to be unaffected by magnets; for example, if you put the magnets under a sheet of plastic or wood, then the iron filings will clump according to the placement of the magnets. On the other hand, if the fender is made of plastic, the magnets won't stick to it in the first place.
That's just my intuition; can anyone correct me on this?
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
You should really consider donating it, there are lots of people who would find such amount of hard drives usefull, if you were to use them you would not waited this long to do so. http://www.freegeek.org/
I seem to recall there is a way to use the magnets and rotating disc inside a hard drive to design a kind of Wankel rotary engine. Now *where* did I see this...? What you need is a bunch of magnets to power the disc, and one or perhaps two electromagnets to work as "spark plugs", to make the disc spin on. You also need software or software-controlled hardware to control WHEN the electromagnets should kick in, and in what sequence. Just like the electronics that control the dual spark plugs in a Wankel. Good, eh?
Beauty is in the beholder of the eye.
putting any real effortinto trying to use all those old hard drives is PENNY-WISE and DOLLAR-FOOLISHdonatethem to a school or worthy charityif your company has a decent accountant you can write off enough to buy some cheap 500gb drives
My best suggestions is to either:
1) donate it as several previous posted suggested, or,
2) have fun like the guys at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YocnQ0NMTUA&feature=related did.
Using those disks for backup can be more expensive in power than buying a single large disk.
http://www.evilmadscientist.com/article.php/WindChimeStory
Sorry I'm such a noob with the linking action.
1) Get a large container that wont damage the drives
;)
2) Load drives into container
3) Pack the drives snug so they don't get damaged
4) Make coffee
5) Call UPS make postage out to me
6) UPS MAGIC
7) Happy Me
Best I can come up with.
I say don't drink and drive, you might spill your drink. Before you get behind the wheel just stop and think.
OK, first of all a couple or triple or more than four 1TB HDD's would be much better than using hundred or more of old ones. Just copy from old ones to new ones and that's it. Five 1TB HDD's in one massive would be a big and nice advantage for info storage over years.
I dont think this is so complicated. first, triage the inventory:
1. Discard all drives older then 5 years or so; all drives fail eventually, and the older they are the more likely they are to reach their failure point.
2. Discard or give away all drives smaller then 160GB or so; lower platter density means lower performance and very likely high power draw per gig.
3. from the remainder, group the disks into matching capacities. capacity groups with only a few drives can be discarded or given away.
What remains is likely a dozen (maybe 2) drives that can be tossed into a cheap box or an ebay'ed server with an older ATA based RAID controller card- instant network storage appliance.
If you're asking how to best go about backing up your critical data to a bunch of old flaky drives... it only begs the question where you got the 'dro :P
But seriously, why?
I have spoken'eth.
All those logic boards are worth it in a huge way. When you have a bad one it can be kind of a pain to find another one of the right board. At my last employer, we had over 400 drives, including mobile drives, and about 1/4 of the time we could find a match, all the rest of the time we couldn't.
Each drive has at least four platters. Skeet shooting, anyone?
The contest for ages has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power. -- Daniel Webster
Yep, this works well for me. I have a slew of 160GB drives and I use them for offsite backups at other family members' houses. I gave up with DVDs when I got to 40GB. Having so many obsolete drives made me able to have multiple offsite backups which is always nice.
However I did go to the dark side first and set up big RAID arrays with them that were very fast. The only snag was I had to do that in each machine else I got upset copying files around as I wasn't using the fast drives efficiently. Then of course you have to get GigE to keep things rolling. Then you realize your time could be better spent posting to /.
Just not worth it. Save the bigger ones, trash or find a non-profit to donate them to. The power pull and potential issues will just add headaches.
Outside the case use the drive cages and pc power supplies solder additional connectors from dead power supplies to load additional drives onto the good power supplies. You could also use firewire, but usb is cheaper.
I'd do it under linux and use the hdparm command to tune the spin down timer on the drives to conserve power, accessing the drives *should* spin them back up.
It might be a good way to back things up as it won't be fast.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Data Robotics, Inc. makes a storage robot that's called Drobo. You can plug up to 4 SATA drives of varying size into it and then hook it up to a network with a Drobo Share base. http://www.drobo.com/
Sell them for $1 each. Then buy 100 tacos for $100.
UTF-8: There and Back Again
Sounds like a candidate for testing RAID 50, and iSCSI.
I've been talking to someone who does extensive work over iSCSI, and I started performance testing his gear. It tested very nicely.
So, if you were to take say 15 300Gb drives and make it a RAID50, you could have a nice 3.6Tb array. iSCSI performance is great, assuming you take a few things into account (namely bandwidth).
Enjoy.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
10 years ago people would have been suggesting massive raid arrays or installing every Linux distro there is. Now it's all about recycling and data security. What happened to you Slashdot? You used to be cool.
You can get ide-usb converters, ones that do 40 pin 3.5" ide, 44 pin 2.5" ide to usb. They are not external cases, just a converter iwth a cable, and a power supply...very minimal but works great. Get enough for all the drives and connect them with a bunch of cheap usb hubs and plug them into a linux box. Make 1 large volume with LVM and viola!