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General discussion

spare hard drives

by sheowahya Jun 5, 2007 6:45AM PDT

I have a collection of old computers that I am finally going to dispose of, but why should I destroy so much wonderful hard drive space? I was thinking of turning them into external drives, but I don't know where to start on that. And I'm not too keen on having multiple external drives. Is there anyway to "daisy chain" them into one unit?

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to "recycle" hard drives from old computers?

Discussion is locked

5 Posts
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What capacity are they?
by ahtoi Jun 5, 2007 7:02AM PDT

I think anything below 20GB is not worth it because an external case will cost around $20-$30. I usually use them as an internal drive instead (if you have room and connection).

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add'l info
by sheowahya Jun 5, 2007 8:58AM PDT

I have 2 that are 200gb and 2 that are 500gb, so you can understand why I want to keep them.

I am ideally looking for something semi-portable. I will be moving overseas later this year and want to keep all of this with me, so putting them into a tower system is not exactly what I want to do.

Also, where I am moving to uses a different power grid than the US, is this a problem??

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Not really
by jackson dougless Jun 5, 2007 9:43AM PDT

The drives themselves don't have a power transformer on them, they rely on something else to do that for them. So, as long as that device is able to handle the 220V (assuming most of Europe) grid, you should be fine.

If moving over seas... Since every pound counts when it comes to shipping costs... I'd just sell whatever you can't stuff into your current box. It may be painful to part with, but the expense of shipping it overseas would probably be more painful. If you've been thinking about maybe upgrading your optical drive, now might be a good time to do that. Sell the one in there, use the bay to slap another hard drive in, then buy a new optical drive on the other side of the pond.

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Check out...
by Willy Jun 5, 2007 9:58PM PDT

You can pack the HDs themselves the best way you can and/or get a durable case to help keep the HDs in shape for transport. Then, wherever you go, look for an ext. case and/or solution there as the problem is probably already addressed and/or the power side with whatever you buy is applicable to your new location. You can at least make 1 HD into an ext. HD and just have it available once you finally settle. You can use "hot swap trays" as well, thus remove a HD when you need to and/or swap them as required. This hot swap is applicable to your current system or a separate raid or simpler but large ext. case, maybe even a NAS type, which may work for you as you have dual HDS of the same capability's, same for RAID.

tada -----Willy Happy

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Yes, but...
by jackson dougless Jun 5, 2007 7:06AM PDT

You can connect a number of drives together into a RAID array, but you still need somewhere to physically locate all the drives. There are racks you can buy for this sort of thing, but they're kind of expensive for a bunch of older drives.

What I might consider doing, is keeping one of the systems you're thinking of getting rid of, and maybe slapping in a PCI IDE card to handle all the additional drives. Then load on a copy of Linux and turn it into a file server system. If you can't fit all the drives into the case, I'd just put in as many as you can, and junk the rest.

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