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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?"
e Bay.
I don't think selling them on ebay is a good idea. You never know what kind of data might be recoverable.
Honestly, if you can't use them in-house, then keep collecting them and let your replacement deal with the mess when you leave for another job.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Who has time to do that on almost 100 drives?
I use the sledge hammer method myself. Hit it until it sounds like a maraca when you shake it.
I don't care why you're posting AC
would be nice to see how they run with ZFS, figure it's as good a reason as any :p
Who has time to do that on almost 100 drives?
Probably a guy who is trying to figure out how to hook up 100 ide drives into a backup system.
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.
Gold leaf? Did I understand you correctly? The stuff that's 1/250000 of an inch thick, or the really thin stuff? There's probably not any gold inside the drives worth recovering--if it is still used in hard drive manufacture. I am struggling to find a reference for that, but I would expect it not to be the case. Gold is used increasingly rarely in electronics these days, as it's rather expensive.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Recycle them in some environmentally responsible fashion.
Old drives = worthless
Indeed. The correct answer is "throw them all away and buy 10x1TB drives for $1000" or something to that effect. Unless your time really is worthless, that will save you time, trouble and money.
Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'
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
So the "douchebag" with a hummer then takes his vehicle to be repaired.
Repainting a vehicle releases a relatively large amount of toxic chemicals into the atmosphere.
Congratulations: because of your dislike of his vehicle's atmospheric pollution, you've just caused more atmospheric pollution. Who's the douche now?
If storage is not a problem, there is no reason to use all the drives now or discard them simply because they are old.
RAID controllers with 12 or 16 channels are dirt cheap on eBay now. Jeantech make some really cheap cases with good cooling and room for 12-16 drives. That would make an excellent NAS, if not for you for a charity or user group, and you have an endless supply of redundant drives to keep it going.
Just because a drive is old, does not mean it is unreliable. Drives do not age much when not in use and stored properly, and besides which you have enough for multiple redundancy (RAID 50 maybe?).
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Double that.
You need the fans, you need an extra controller card for every 4 of them, the mainboards, etc.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
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
I agree that it's not worth trying to build a hundred-obsolete-drive array, but I strongly disagree with turning them into garbage prematurely. Sell or give away on ebay/craigslist/freecycle/whatever instead. There are lots of people who can make good use of a few end-of-life-but-still-working medium capacity drives. Just make sure you erase them thoroughly first. Realistically 'dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda' is plenty; to be absolutely sure give them one pass with a fast random number generator first.
If you want magnets you can take them from failed drives.
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
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
Dont try to boot from the drives on the funky addon controller. Connect a drive to the mobo's standard built-in controller, and boot (Linux) from that, then use the additional drives for other mounts- Linux doesnt need the bios in order to access drives for storage.
These sizes are still useful for putting in external USB enclosures and using as a laptop backup drive (with something like Ghost).
Ghost is useless nowadays, when symantec bought norton, they screwed it up. Remember to take an very old versionHow they screwed up?
A) You can't even easily do full drive images with it anymore
B) Where's the DOS based tools?
C) Even recovering from it's "backup" is a doomed failure without installed OS + Ghost.
Ghost is a ghost of itself from back when it was usefull.
Pulsed Media Seedboxes
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.
Degaussing the drives would be pointless. It destroys the low level formatting, possibly permanently. If the intention is to resell the drives, what's the point of rendering them unusable? Just zero the dang thing. If the data is so important that you're afraid of people with high-tech equipment to recover data from a zeroed drive, maybe you shouldn't be selling them in the first place.
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]