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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.
I think this is how Google started. Throw in some other random hardware and wait for the VC to come rolling in!
Why would you give away perfectly good magnets to a douchebag when you can just as well key his hummer?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
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
Make it a true geeks trick. Put the magnets on the inside of the fender spelling out "Very Small Penis". Then shake some iron filings over it. It'll keep trying to reform the words as he wipes it off and each day when you walk by it just sprinkle some more filings over the spot to keep the joke going. See how long it takes him to figure out they are on the inside or he sells the Hummer. If you can get inside the Hummer you could also stick a fist full inside the drivers seat cushion so they demagnetize his credit cards. Once again the gift that keeps on giving as it keeps demagnetizing each replacement set of cards.....In short magnets are useful for tormenting yuppies.
I stand humbled by your brilliance. If there were a Nobel Prize for malicious pranks, it would be yours.
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.