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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?"
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.
But d0000000d, yer missing the point. He wants to do something 1337 hAxXoRz with all these drives. I mean, really, selling them on eBay would be what the n0rmLz would do.
Pry them open, remove those awesomely strong magnets, and stick them all over some douchebag's Hummer.
I think this is how Google started. Throw in some other random hardware and wait for the VC to come rolling in!
power_to_run_100_hard_drives = 100 * power_to_run_1_hard_drive
Who has time to do that on almost 100 drives?
People that don't actually stare at the screen the entire time a disk is being wiped.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90jOYSfqG9I
Porn backup.
Will they blend?
Yeah, at least it's not like the Windows 98 defrag utility, where you could stare for hours until you realized you've been doing nothing but staring at the screen the whole time.
Time well wasted, I guess...
Impossible.
Just because you don't grasp physics doesn't make it go away.
We're all born with nothing.
If you die in debt, you're ahead.
Or if he's lucky, he'll get super powers. It's gotta happen eventually, right?
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.