What do y'all do with your old hard drives?
I'm finally upgrading to a 1 TB SSD and i'm not sure what to do with the ol' HDD. some say they convert theirs into an external drive which sounds easy enough, but are there other potential projects?
I use them for Jellyfin media storage, archival of things I'm afraid could be gone from the internet eventually (specific drivers, compiled versions of obscure projects, etc), and if you have even more, just set it as a clone backup of your SSD.
Same here. It's important to preserve these things that can easily disappear from the internet forever. After the recent lawsuit with the Internet Archive for lending eBooks without the publisher's permission during the Coronavirus pandemic, they may be in serious trouble and we might lose a significant amount of our recent history.
Data can disappear, so I constantly advocate for others to back up their stuff locally as well as online. Just doing backups through trusted services like Western Digital, Google, etc. can still lead to data loss, so it's important to have a 3-2-1 backup strategy (3 backups, 2 physical backups in different locations, 1 online at a minimum). Just for the things you can't afford to lose.
Western Digital customers who trusted the WD Live service to backup their data suddenly found that all their data was gone, without their permission: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/06/mass-data-wipe-in-my-book-devices-prompts-warning-from-western-digital/
Keep it in the PC as a secondary drive, you can move some gsmes to it which don't really benefit from the SSD, or just move them so you don't have to download them again.
It's also great for media storage, playing movies from SSD won't be any faster, and if you keep your PC powered on, you can setup a plex server or a network share, and access the movies from the TV for example. You can also make backups of your data from the SSD to the HDD, it's not as good as a backup in a separate computer, but it can still protect your data in case your boot drive goes corrupt (because of Windows updates), or simply if you delete a file by accident.
Leave them stashed away until I get a random request for a file many years later, by which time they are inaccessible
If it works, put it in my media server PC,
if it doesn't work, this
lol that's a great movie!
Keep them in a box in my closet and tell myself I'll use them for a storage/media server 🥲
No better day to start than today!
I don’t get a ton of use out of my Jellyfin server but it’s nice to have the option when I inevitably get tired of paying for streaming services.
I just use them as an extra drive so I can have more things on my system without having to delete things
I just keep setting them up as external hard drives. I keep non demanding steam games on them.
If its big enough to still be of viable use(500gb+), I'd keep it in my PC and turn it into a data drive.
If its to small to bother continuing to use (<240gb), I'd just harvest the magnets out of it and destroy the disks.
If they haven't failed, who couldn't use extra storage? See how many you can fit in a case and make a rig for your backups why not
I have all those HDDs and even some SDDs somewhere in a drawer thinking to use them somewhere in the future, while knowing full well that I'll end up buying a new drive whenever I need one... 😅
If it's a piece of junk, you can always rip it apart and pull out the magnets and use the rest for target practice.
If it's a nice drive keep it in your computer for Media Storage / Game Storage.
Buy a small board computer (RPi or something similar) and turn it into a NAS on your local network.
Use it as a backup drive for your main drive/documents.
I moved it to my new PC with the plan of copying everything over to the new, bigger HDD as a backup for all the stuff that has followed my upgrade chain since 1995.
Then I put that off a couple months, and the old hard drive died.
It's been a few years since that happened and I'm still so incredibly upset about that.
Some gaming consoles rely on the FAT32 file system to play backed up games. I typically use my old drives for that because of the limitations of FAT32 making them impractical for day to day use
Buy or make a nas/server. Good for backups, media, pihole, etc.
Scrub them then reformat and fill them with definitely not pirated stuff and definitely not scraped reddit stuff.
For work, the larger drives (4TB+) get used for archive storage alongside NVMe primaries. Everything else, at least those below 1TB used to get secure wiped then drilled but it got old fast as now we've got boxes and boxes of them going rusty in storage
Use veracrypt and then use it for my personal documents. Keep in a safe place incase something major happens to my house.
I grandfather then through a number of systems. When it no longer makes sense: Secure wipe and donate, or drill through and dispose of.
I used to keep them forever, but ever since I got myself a NAS, i try not to let them accumulate.
Good tip! I also encrypt all my drives - systems won't even boot without a password.
Come to think about it, I haven't taken a drill to any recent drive, but did a few phones and old tablets.
Haven't really used spinning disks for anything but my home NAS since 2010 or so. Which means all my old drives come out of the NAS... And either get cycled into my backup NAS or put into a multi-disk jbod enclosure that I use as "scratch" space for random data projects I'm doing on the side.
Ones that cycle out of scratch space are wiped and, if I'm being honest, sitting in a stack in my storage room. I really should stop procrastinating a trip to the recyclers...
For HDD, I do a shred with about 30 passes, and then try to repurpose it into a server or it sits in a box.
Kinda overkill if you'll be reusing it yourself anyway. I'd understand if you gave it away or sold it.
Does anyone else find that things like this go faster if sold for a low, low price versus given away free?
hoard them. I have a stack of like 10 hard drives and 4 laptop hard drives. If I need one I move all the files off of it onto another.
If they aren't reliable anymore, you can pull the magnets.