What do you do with old HDD/SSD

[PiesAreGreat]

I have a few old HDD or SSD knocking round, mostly after upgrades.

What do you do with old HDD or SSD?

I have bought one or two caddy cases for £5 form ebay, so I can use them as an external USB drive, but all the caddy cases seem to be for a single 2.5" drive, are there any that would hold (say) 5 x 2.5" dives that are fairly cheap (lets face it, they are just a plastic box!), so at least they would be tidier (presumably with a plug for each drive).

I am tempted to just create something from Balsa wood, at least it would be done in an hour or two.

[Skyedriver]

I usually throw them on the bonfire. I have a couple of dedicated external hard drives, any HD out of an old lap top/PC could fail and there's your back up lost.

[Sporky]

I take the HDDs apart. There are lots of lovely shiny bits inside.

[mmm-five]

Sporky said:

I take the HDDs apart. There are lots of lovely shiny bits inside.

Nice shiny platters make great targets for slingshot/catapult/BB-gun/air rifle.

The magnets are great for causing blood blisters

[Sporky]

And the wigglestick bit looks like technology.

[Funky Squirrel]

Use them in a NAS for extra storage of low value data. Build a cheap pc for home theatre etc

[Sporky]

yesterjay said:

I hoard every single one.



Just in case.

Then carry them about to any new place I live. Convincing myself that one day they'll be useful until eventually they become so out of date and obsolete that anything remaining on them is a lonely reminder of a time passed, a simpler era of less pixels, data, speed.

Where I intended to utilise but the future took its hold and I'm left with the physical remnants of a past glory, and a wasted hope.

Fewer pixels, damn your eyes sir!

[paulrockliffe]

Funky Squirrel said:

Use them in a NAS for extra storage of low value data. Build a cheap pc for home theatre etc

My server has capacity for something like 12 disks, so I have about 2Tb in there that's old drives around 500gb, some of them are properly old, but the server is setup and the RAID configuration mean that they only spin up for testing unless the server gets really full and that never happens because it's dead easy to preempt it.

With the right software you could probably find a use for them for caching data on a home network, but nothing seems to work that way. Like I could plug it into a local Plex player and if I start watching a series if copies all the files to that drive so Plex can play them locally. Might be useful for some of the large file formats for and crappy networks, but I've not seen an easy way to make it work.

Part of the problem is that if you have a decent server setup then most things you can think of can just be replicated with a Docker container in minutes these days.

One thing they're useful for on the server is as cache drives, but SSDs are so cheap that it makes sense to just pay a few quid for an SSD for each cache.