Slashdot Mirror
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?"
I doubt its worth using a bunch of old smaller drives.
between the power requirements and all the extra hardware needed to run them i would just sell them all on ebay and take the $ to buy a couple of huge drives, mirror and do iscsi with them.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Granted, you have a few less than others, but it's worth giving a shot
Would be a super generous donation, but if you honestly don't have a practical idea, perhaps donate to your local Free Geek chapter? Good drives at that size could help in the fight for bringing technology to those who couldn't afford it otherwise.
http://mediagoblin.org/
http://www.thementoringctr.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=pages.Digital&
Im sure you could donate the hard drives to them and get a tax writeoff...or
find something similar in your community
freenas + old motherboard + all pci slots full of cheap IDE cards.
works great, dont bother with IDE drive size versus Motherboard/Bios as freenas does not use the bios.
I have made a couple of 2TB arrays from less than a couple hundred bucks and a bunch of free 250gb hard drives.
You can do a software raid5 which gives you some peace of mind.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I can't imagine the storage is worth the time to set up something that can use them all given new 500GB drives They are probably most useful in cheap USB to IDE enclosures as additional external storage - nice for convenient system backups, offsites, and extra storage.
One idea I've been tossing around in the back of my head for a while is a backup-to-disk device which is kind of a cross between a tape library and a raid enclosure. It would emulate a tape robot and drives so that normal backup software could talk to it, and would just power up drives as they are needed and read/write to them. The advantages are that there is no expensive robot with moving parts, only a few drives need to be powered up at once, the drives will probably last longer if they stay off most of the time, "tape seeks" would stay nearly instant, and you don't need RAID controller ports for every drive you have (just a switching fabric for routing the ports you have to the drives you want to talk to.)
It'd probably only be practical with SATA or SAS (fewer wires and availability of multiplexing chips).
Maybe someone can do me a favor and steal my idea so I can buy some hardware like this fairly soon. :)
But you could make a hard disk generator I've seen several designs and some are better than others, but there isn't a great way to string out hundreds of IDE drives without a cluster and multiple processors. After weeding out a number of the large drives for storage, it may be a fun project to mess around with.
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
You could build a climbing suit for climbing steel, build a generator,....
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Pick the largest and buy up as many usb or firewire interfaces and drop them in a tower case with a psu for the HD's (get bus powered usb/firewire interfaces) and have a decent sized external array...
or use the larger ones as customer throwaways - when the video needs to go to the customer and its really big - ship them a cheap usb/firewire enclosure with a disc in it loaded with their video - if it doesn't come back then you've got more to spare....
Life is but a Beta test...
I'm actually thinking that it's a waste of effort. If they average, say, 100Gb each, then 100 drives means 10TB. 10TB these days is worth what? $2'000.00 worth of 1TB drives? Even less? More like $1'700.00 or so -- and that's for brand new drives, faster, better, more reliable, modern technologies, SATA, etc etc etc. Power consumptions too.
By the time you're done connecting all of these, and powering them, and cooling them, and dodging the broken ones, and finding a good use for it, and controllers to run them all, I can't imagine you'll be saving many dollars for storage, if any. Not to mention your time -- although it would be fun to spend.
So in the end, you'll have all of the benefits of a massive raid solution, but it'll be expensive to build, expensive to run, and take up a rediculous amount of world space (the real storage requirement).
I don't think they can compete as functioning hard drives. I think you should use them for some other purpose -- like art, or coasters, or to hold up your table.
For example, I have about 500 issues of national geographic from the 80's. They even have those file volume collection thingies so ten get held tegother as a set. I have some rediculous number like 50 sets. These things are totally useless to me -- unlike my nintendo power issues from the '80s that my mother sold about fifteen years ago -- so I got a piece of nice glass, and now have a coffee table that sits on these magazines instead of on legs. It's a nice piece of furniture from which you can reach in a pull out a blast from the past as you sip that coffee.
These sizes are still useful for putting in external USB enclosures and using as a laptop backup drive (with something like Ghost).
I saw this a while ago, but never got bored enough to try.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fp4jQNa_9sY&feature=related
One hundred drives, drawing 10W or more each (older drives were a bit more power-hungry, nowadays they're a bit under 10W) makes for 1000W. At $0.10/kWh that's $876/year. Add the power consumption of the other hardware you'll need to attach them to, and you'll surely be over $1000/year in energy costs, not to mention the purchase cost of said hardware.
:j
You said 100 drives ranging 20-300GB... that doesn't tell us much about the total capacity, but let's say it's 10TB. A terabyte disk costs less than $200 these days, a 4-port SATA PCI card can be had for $40, so with two of those and the 2 SATA ports on any cheap mobo you have a system that'll serve up your 10TB for $2000, two years of just the energy cost of your 100 disc system.
And that's not counting the headache of building your 100 disk array, the maintenance cost, and the reduced capacity due to inevitable failures with such a large number of older discs.
In short, although a cool project in theory, in practice it's not worth it today. A few years ago it would have been, but the price of storage has just dropped too steeply in the last couple of years.
I work with a group that "recycles" old machines in a developing country to provide access to young people who couldn't afford it otherwise, and even here, with free (donated) hardware it's hard to beat the falling price/performance curve of computer hardware these days. Although we could use your discs... discs (and memory) are shortest in supply. If you want to donate them to us, drop me a line.
since they're strong, they should donate them to the local university physics students so they can build their electric motors!
I wish we would've had some nice hardcore magnets when that project came up!
What do you shoot them with? I've got several hundred rounds of steel-core 7.62x54R and an old Mosin.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
If I was every to actually try something like this, this is exactly the kind of thing that I would try with ZFS first.
Not just for the simple software raid and all that, but for the automatic block checksumming, something I would be concerned about with a big pile of really old drives.
Make a bunch of chess sets out of the various parts.
Something like this.
http://www.novica.com/itemdetail/index.cfm?pid=121771
The platters of could serve as the white squares maybe?
Solaris' ZFS (BTW, Apple and FreeBSD ported ZFS to their own OSes) has the concept of storage pools. Perfect for lots of unreliable hard drives.
In fact, Sun's x4500 uses 48 off-the-shelf SATA hard drives for mission crtical storage.