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?"

Comments

How About Just a Dozen?

[Doc Ruby]

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.

Data recovery services

[Loualbano2]

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

Careful with the magnets

[mangu]

Take 'em apart and sell or use the magnets

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.

Re:magnets (how to keep them?)

[profplump]

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.

Re:Bunches of small drives

[BigFootApe]

Rebate them with the manufacturer. That way, they're out of circulation (in case of privacy concerns).

Re:Bunches of small drives

[wooferhound]

Using Your Hard Drive magnets to make a wind Generator
http://www.fieldlines.com/story/2006/2/9/13128/15117
http://www.fieldlines.com/story/2006/10/8/112046/572
http://www.fieldlines.com/story/2005/9/24/152446/359

How to remove Hard Drive magnets from their mounting plate
http://www.fieldlines.com/story/2006/10/4/181345/402

Recycling parts from Hard drives
http://www.fieldlines.com/story/2006/11/9/01948/0162

Donate?

[pluther]

Drives that size would be an awesome donation for a charity such as (blatant plug) Geeks Without Borders.

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.

Ummm in a word.... no

[Allnighterking]

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.

Re:100 ata hard drives? forget going green

[AmiMoJo]

Average HDD power consumption varies but 5W at idle and 8W under load is probably a reasonable average.

500-800W to run 100 HDDs. Some PCs use that much alone. Even these days, it's still worth using older HDDs, because the cost of replacing them with bigger and more energy efficient ones is still not low enough to cover the cost of running an older drive for a few years. Especially if your NAS supports power saving.

Re:1 word: magnets

[Everyone Is Seth]

Umm, we don't even know if a magnetic monopole exists. Currently, theory is the only place you can find one.

Re:Bunches of small drives

[hairyfeet]

Actually it is butt simple if you do it like I do. I simply keep a couple of old 233Mhz SFFs with the tops off in a corner. If you boot them off a floppy you can use all 4 IDE slots for drives and just round robin them until they are all complete. If you don't want to go that route you can always leave a cd rom on one of the IDE slots and fill the other three with drives. Then just use whichever tool you prefer(I like this one) and check/switch drives every couple of days. Before you know it you'll have a pile of clean drives without hardly doing anything at all.

But I have to agree with the previous posters about the power required. If you have a bunch of 300Gb it might be worth it,but less than 100Gb you'll end up wasting more than you gain. What I usually like to do with them is if I have an extra slot on the HD IDE I put the smaller drive as a dedicated swap. Takes some of the wear and tear off the main drive and gives you a nice little speed boost as well. But that is my 02c,YMMV

DoD now specifies to degause or slag drives

[Anonymous Coward]

If you use the software approved by the DoD for 'cleaning' you should be safe. First off, the DoD is no longer responsible for writing the standards, NIST is. Their document that covers this is NIST 800-88.

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.

Re:Bunches of small drives

[UncleTogie]

Or could try degaussing. could do quite a few at a time, and only takes a few seconds.

We experimented with that at the shop. Your typical degaussing ring doesn't generally have the field strength to wipe 'em. Heck...in our test, after zero-writing 'em, and checking 'em after 5, 10, 30, and 60 seconds of D-ring exposure we didn't appear to lose a bit.

Note: dedicated hard drive degaussers can get really expensive, too... It's MUCH cheaper to stick with software methodology. Have a look here for details on both methods...

Re:1 word: magnets

[Rick Bentley]

(geek)

There are no magnetic monopoles in theory, either. Maxwell's four equations that define all of Electromagnetism, includes Gauss's Law of Magnetism. This law states that magnetic fields don't in net diverge.

Its usually written in differential form as: del * B = 0 (del dot B = 0). Note that Physics students from bush-league universities might write the equation in integral form, but that's either a product of their deficient education or maybe some kind of genetic defect.

More here (wikipedia):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauss's_law_for_magnetism and here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell's_equations

Yeah, I suppose magnetic monopoles might exist and then we'd re-write the laws, but there's no reason to assume so. There is a natural temptation to look at magnetism the same as electricity (individual charges, like electrons and protons, being analogous to "North" and "South" monopoles), but probably the most useful way to think of magnetism is as a relativistic effect of electrostatics... once you do that, there's no reason to assume any kind of magnetic monopole at all.

(/geek)

Re:Bunches of small drives

[ImaLamer]

What I usually like to do with them is if I have an extra slot on the HD IDE I put the smaller drive as a dedicated swap. Takes some of the wear and tear off the main drive and gives you a nice little speed boost as well. But that is my 02c,YMMV

This is always a good idea. Move the swap and the Windows temp to this drive and keep it formatted FAT32 (or lower). If you can, partition the disk up and give it two 2 gig partitions. Each partition should be formatted FAT16 (aka: FAT, no 32). FAT32 and FAT16 need to read/write to the disk less for each transaction than NTFS and is much faster for it. Since it's just swap and temp files, you don't need NTFS.

If you do this, you leave the rest of the drive open for users' personal files or whatever. The two partition setup should be one for swapfiles, the other for temp files. You can get more creative and create another for a web browser cache, but as you create partitions the drive head has to move farther to span the space and slows down the operation. A large FAT32 partition works well if you dig deep and move a lot off onto this second drive. Another thing to keep in mind is what people are going to be putting into their temp directory. Video work might create files bigger than the partition. In this case, create a 2 gig swap partition at FAT16 and leave the rest FAT32 for normal files.

I always get a second drive now for this reason. Helps in both Windows and Linux. For even better results, keep the drives on different IDE channels. Just think, the overall strategy is to keep one disk working on program data and the other working on the memory swap data - a major bottleneck, especially at IDE speeds.