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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.
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.
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
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.
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'
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.