What to do with spare hard drives?

[sygyzy]

Hi,

What do you guys do with all your spare HD's. I have at least two 120GB's, a 80GB, maybe some 40GB's lying around. I don't want to put them in separate external enclosures because a) I don't have enough spare USB ports to support them all and b) I don't want to keep 4 USB HD's plugged in especially since the only time I stoer anything on them is for manual backup sessions or for long term archiving.

I thought of putting them all into a compact enclosure and having it run as JBOD (just a bunch of disks) but every product I've found is selling for around $200. Why would it be so expensive, when you can just get a single drive enclosure for $15? I could build one but I doubt I can find a compact box with controller for that cheap.

BTW, these are all PATA drives.

So what are you guys doing with all your spare drives?

 

[Cr0nJ0b]

I usually just put them into my linux file server in a software RAID set until i get so tired of the reliability I throw them away.

The 80s are really small...and the 40GB is just rediculous. They are probably pretty old as well, so...If I were you...

Take the 120s and the 80 and put it in a system. Load up UBUNTU. partition the 120s into an 80GB and 40GB parts then RAID 5 the 80GB parts and RAID 0 the 40GB parts. That will give you 160GB of usable RAID5 protected disk and another 80GB of unpretects scratch space.

If you don't like Unix you can try this on Windows, but I'm not sure about software RAID in windows.

It's a fun experiment, but eventually you will probably realize that you can buy a new 500GB SATA for like $90, and it's easier to buy and replace then try to keep the old stuff running.

Personally, the smallest thing I will run now is 160GB...anything smaller is using more power than it's worth to me.

 

[Zepper]

USB isn't a really good solution for multiple HDDs. FW or eSATA will do better, but you're probably talking PATA drives there so eSATA is out unless you want to get a PATA to SATA adapter for each of your drives.

.bh.