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

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: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.

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.

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: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)