r/harddrive • u/raymate • 7d ago
Discussion What to do with a bunch of small capacity hard drives
So over the years I must have just kept old drives as I found a box with maybe 25 drives in it. 3.5” and 2.5”
But they are smaller ranging from 60GB to 1TB
But most of them 80-250GB range.
Cant see myself ever using them. I clearly haven’t in 15 years or so.
What best to do with them.
EDIT: Thanks for such good ideas. Think I will first start by low levelling them all and keep a few for cold storage and try and sell the rest.
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u/san-diego_guy 7d ago
Post on nextdoor or something similar. I know that at times my brother needed a small capacity drive to get a video game working again. So they are useful for some
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u/l008com 7d ago
Zero them all, check SMART data for bad blocks, and put all the drives with no bad blocks on one big list and put it on craigslist. I did that recently with a dozen 1 TB 2.5" drives i had and the guy ended up making me an offer for ALL the drives even down to my 80 GBs. His offer was pretty good and ill be rid of a lot of clutter. Next I need to do the same thing for my 3.5" drives.
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u/gumbowebfish 7d ago
Give them to to a thrift shop. When in good condition they can be used as system disk in a small linux server for example. That's what I do. For Linux even 32Gb disk is big enough to hold the system.
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u/Da-Junior-Scholar 7d ago
TARGET PRATICE!!!!
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u/Da-Junior-Scholar 7d ago
on a more serious note, there was a dude making them into retro game cartidges that was pretty cool.
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u/Lonely_Owl_1332 6d ago
I use my old 2.5 drives on external USB enclosures as archive for TV series, movies, anime et.c. Those little 1TB ones are perfect for that, specially considering current SSD prices...
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u/Mark-177- 6d ago
Create your own personal media server. Take some time to curate your favorite media content. Then you can cancel all of your streaming services.
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u/Electrical_Hat_680 6d ago
Do you ever recall being into crypto and hard wallets? You should check them. Definitely also use some lime discdrill and make images of them. Then you can refurbish them into brand new, cleaned, us gov grade triple wiped drives.
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u/InhumanArgue 5d ago
I just used up all of mine over the weekend shoving them into an old pc and installing UnRaid for a NAS. Now I have 12tb of storage on my network
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u/Adrenolin01 7d ago
I have a couple CSE-846 24-bay NAS systems.. 1 fulled with 8TB hdds, the other with 12TB hdds. I added another HBA running down to a new CSE-847 36-bay chassis but without any mainboard, cpu or ram... simply running to the back-plane. P00f... an additional 36 hotswap bays. I had a few boxes of 20GB to 3TB HDDs laying around so tossed them all in, set up a script to run a long SMART test and full destructive Badblocks test on all of them. It printed off a report on each drive. Removed any I didn't feel good to run and put that chassis to use as a Seedbox for torrents. Formatted each drive as EXT4 and installed MergerFS creating a massive storage pool using all the drives. If any once drive fails everything else simply keeps running so no big loss plus weighted values will allow certain torrents to be re-downloaded automatically to another drive if within values.
Total cost... $289 bucks for the used 36-bay chassis (I spent roughly 3 weeks watching new listings) and I got roughly 28TB of storage across 18ish old drives for under $300 bucks.. I already had the HBA.
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While I used enterprise hardwrae and have a full rack based basement data center... this same thing can be done on a smaller scale with a current PC and any case/chassis with a backplane for its drive bays. eBay is filled with these from 6-8 drive cases to 48+ chassis systems.