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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?"
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 ----
spin around in a circle and see who can throw them the greatest distance
Contrary to popular belief, Unix is user friendly. It just happens to be particular about who it makes friends with.
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/
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.
I think this is how Google started. Throw in some other random hardware and wait for the VC to come rolling in!
Why would you give away perfectly good magnets to a douchebag when you can just as well key his hummer?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
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
power_to_run_100_hard_drives = 100 * power_to_run_1_hard_drive
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.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90jOYSfqG9I
Even better, they're monopoles (Halbach Arrays). Build your own maglev toys.
Make it a true geeks trick. Put the magnets on the inside of the fender spelling out "Very Small Penis". Then shake some iron filings over it. It'll keep trying to reform the words as he wipes it off and each day when you walk by it just sprinkle some more filings over the spot to keep the joke going. See how long it takes him to figure out they are on the inside or he sells the Hummer. If you can get inside the Hummer you could also stick a fist full inside the drivers seat cushion so they demagnetize his credit cards. Once again the gift that keeps on giving as it keeps demagnetizing each replacement set of cards.....In short magnets are useful for tormenting yuppies.
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.
If the masses can keep you down, you're not the Ubermensch.
Umm, we don't even know if a magnetic monopole exists. Currently, theory is the only place you can find one.
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 stand humbled by your brilliance. If there were a Nobel Prize for malicious pranks, it would be yours.
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.
Impossible.
Just because you don't grasp physics doesn't make it go away.
We're all born with nothing.
If you die in debt, you're ahead.
(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)
My favorite quote doesn't fit into 120 characters. Now no one will like me.