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What To Do With a Hundred Hard Drives?
Posted by
Soulskill
on Fri Jun 13, 2008 05:20 PM
from the build-a-hard-drive-cannon dept.
from the build-a-hard-drive-cannon dept.
Makoto916 writes "In five years with my current employer as the IT administrator, I've amassed a sizable cabinet of discarded hard drives; just shy of 100, in fact. All of the drives range in size from 20GB up to 300GB. They've all been stored in anti-stat bags, and spot checks of even the oldest ones show that most of them still work. Individually, they're mostly useless for our line of work, which is digital video production. However, the collective storage potential is quite significant. They are of varying size and speed, but the one commonality is they're all IDE. What is the best way to approach connecting all of these devices and realizing their storage potential? On a budget, of course. Now, I'd never use such an array for critical data storage, but it certainly would be useful as a massive backup array to our existing SAN that does store critical data. I have several spare and functioning PCs, but not nearly enough to utilize their internal IDE controllers; even with multiple add-in controllers, it still wouldn't be enough. Not to mention the nightmare of managing a bunch of independent PCs. I've looked into ATA Over Ethernet and there's a lot of potential there, but current 15 to 20 bay AoE cabinets are expensive, and single device enclosures are so rare that they're also expensive. Are there any hardware hackers out there who have crafted their own home-brew AoE systems? Could they scale to 100 drives? Is there a better way?"
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Bunches of small drives (Score:5, Interesting)
between the power requirements and all the extra hardware needed to run them i would just sell them all on ebay and take the $ to buy a couple of huge drives, mirror and do iscsi with them.
Re:Bunches of small drives (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Bunches of small drives (Score:5, Interesting)
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Careful with the magnets (Score:5, Informative)
Just keep in mind these are *STRONG* magnets. When you take it apart the magnets may smash into each other. This could send particles flying away in a direction that, according to Murphy, is where your eyes are. I know this by experience, lucky for me I wear glasses. And if some of your flesh is between the magnets, it's painful.
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Re:Careful with the magnets (Score:5, Interesting)
I wish we would've had some nice hardcore magnets when that project came up!
Parent
Re:Bunches of small drives (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.fieldlines.com/story/2006/2/9/13128/15117 [fieldlines.com]
http://www.fieldlines.com/story/2006/10/8/112046/572 [fieldlines.com]
http://www.fieldlines.com/story/2005/9/24/152446/359 [fieldlines.com]
How to remove Hard Drive magnets from their mounting plate
http://www.fieldlines.com/story/2006/10/4/181345/402 [fieldlines.com]
Recycling parts from Hard drives
http://www.fieldlines.com/story/2006/11/9/01948/0162 [fieldlines.com]
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Re:Bunches of small drives (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree that it's not worth trying to build a hundred-obsolete-drive array, but I strongly disagree with turning them into garbage prematurely. Sell or give away on ebay/craigslist/freecycle/whatever instead. There are lots of people who can make good use of a few end-of-life-but-still-working medium capacity drives. Just make sure you erase them thoroughly first. Realistically 'dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda' is plenty; to be absolutely sure give them one pass with a fast random number generator first.
If you want magnets you can take them from failed drives.
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Re:Bunches of small drives (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Bunches of small drives (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Bunches of small drives (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Bunches of small drives (Score:5, Insightful)
Who has time to do that on almost 100 drives?
I use the sledge hammer method myself. Hit it until it sounds like a maraca when you shake it.
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Re:Bunches of small drives (Score:5, Insightful)
Probably a guy who is trying to figure out how to hook up 100 ide drives into a backup system.
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Re:Bunches of small drives (Score:5, Funny)
Who has time to do that on almost 100 drives?
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Re:Bunches of small drives (Score:5, Funny)
Time well wasted, I guess...
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Re:Bunches of small drives (Score:5, Informative)
But I have to agree with the previous posters about the power required. If you have a bunch of 300Gb it might be worth it,but less than 100Gb you'll end up wasting more than you gain. What I usually like to do with them is if I have an extra slot on the HD IDE I put the smaller drive as a dedicated swap. Takes some of the wear and tear off the main drive and gives you a nice little speed boost as well. But that is my 02c,YMMV
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DoD now specifies to degause or slag drives (Score:5, Informative)
The standards for data sanitization is more stringent now. Anything that is more sensitive than Classified, and leaves the control of the organization disposing of the drives, needs to be either put through a degauser, chopped up into tiny pieces, or turned into slag. If the media is simply going to be re-used with-in the organization then wiping is okay.
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Re:Bunches of small drives (Score:5, Interesting)
-1 on the power requirements.
Get yourself a nice RAID-box to hook'em into and use the thing for backup. Hard disks have a pretty good life span when they're powered down. And their power requirements are zero in that case. Bring it up once a year and run your favorite disk-scan over the array and power it back down. Cheaper than tape backup.
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hard diskus throw (Score:5, Funny)
Play dominos (Score:5, Interesting)
AUction them off (Score:5, Insightful)
There really just a waste of company space and time.
Free Geek (Score:5, Interesting)
Seriously? power requirements are high to scale. (Score:5, Insightful)
Something a little more worthwhile... (Score:5, Interesting)
Im sure you could donate the hard drives to them and get a tax writeoff...or
find something similar in your community
freeNAS (Score:5, Interesting)
works great, dont bother with IDE drive size versus Motherboard/Bios as freenas does not use the bios.
I have made a couple of 2TB arrays from less than a couple hundred bucks and a bunch of free 250gb hard drives.
You can do a software raid5 which gives you some peace of mind.
Unpopular choice: (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, all slashdotters would say either build an array or donate. In reality, the company should keep the biggest for desktop usage and shred the rest.
Safer for you and the company in terms of liability.
Not technically legal, but (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Not technically legal, but (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Not technically legal, but (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Not technically legal, but (Score:5, Funny)
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How About Just a Dozen? (Score:5, Informative)
At first I just got a dozen SATA/EIDE USB slaves for $10 each, and plugged them all into a USB hub, with just the single USB cable stretching out of the case over to another full PC's USB socket. But that is so slow, especially when copying big music or video files between drives (and through the single USB cable to the CPU and back). Playing multiple media files to different terminals in my house is too much bandwidth for the single USB, too. Running 4 USB from the big enclosure to the 4 sockets in the server PC isn't much better, because it all goes through the same CPU and PCI bus.
So I got 3 Sabrent SBT-SRD4 [google.com] 4xSATA controller PCI cards, because they were $25 each. But when I tried to boot them in a few different motherboards (pre-HP Compaq P3/1.2GHz, IBM P4/3.2GHz), none of them got past the POST to even start booting the OS. I want to use them with Linux, but with the failure to even boot I'm not hopeful about driver support, either.
I bought them from CompUSA (still alive, online only), which hasn't replied to (email only - no phone available) tech support requests. Nor has Sabrent itself. I'm not hopeful that they'll refund my money, since everything else about this transaction has sucked.
So what I want to know is what cheap motherboard (no need for graphics or anything else other than at least 3 PCI slots and 100Mb-1Gb ethernet) will work with these SATA cards? If they're really duds, what is the cheapest way to get 12 SATA drives controlled, even if they're not that fast, over to 100Mb/Gb ethernet? Either SATA cards + motherboard, or even a fat mobo with a dozen SATA ports. I'd even settle for just 4-8 SATA ports to get started. I'm talking under $200 if possible.
Ideas? If it works, then 8-9 of them should support the 100 HDs the original question was asking about.
There is huge potential... (Score:5, Funny)
You won't get any hard drive space out of it... (Score:5, Interesting)
Data recovery services (Score:5, Informative)
Apparently, a lot of failed hard drives are not bad because of their physical platters, but because of the drive logic. These places need old drives for replacement controllers that you probably can't buy from the manufacturer.
ft
Probably not worthwhile (Score:5, Interesting)
By the time you're done connecting all of these, and powering them, and cooling them, and dodging the broken ones, and finding a good use for it, and controllers to run them all, I can't imagine you'll be saving many dollars for storage, if any. Not to mention your time -- although it would be fun to spend.
So in the end, you'll have all of the benefits of a massive raid solution, but it'll be expensive to build, expensive to run, and take up a rediculous amount of world space (the real storage requirement).
I don't think they can compete as functioning hard drives. I think you should use them for some other purpose -- like art, or coasters, or to hold up your table.
For example, I have about 500 issues of national geographic from the 80's. They even have those file volume collection thingies so ten get held tegother as a set. I have some rediculous number like 50 sets. These things are totally useless to me -- unlike my nintendo power issues from the '80s that my mother sold about fifteen years ago -- so I got a piece of nice glass, and now have a coffee table that sits on these magazines instead of on legs. It's a nice piece of furniture from which you can reach in a pull out a blast from the past as you sip that coffee.
Be practical -- screw the smaller drives. (Score:5, Insightful)
Either your 10-20 drive pilot project will be a raging success, and your boss will be beating down your door to get the other drives plugged in, or it'll prove to be a huge waste of time, in which case you'll be glad you didn't bother with the smaller drives.
Donate? (Score:5, Informative)
A lot of our donated computers don't come with hard drives, so we're always in need of hard drives more than just about anything else.
We wipe all drives to DoD standards before ever putting them in anything, too. (Well, anything other than the machines we use to wipe 'em.)
If you don't want to ship them all the way to Eugene, there's lots of other charities that do the same kind of thing, and probably have the same disproportionate computer to hard drive donation ratio.
Ummm in a word.... no (Score:5, Informative)
1. Call a recycler and dump the drives. smaller than 200GB (keep the largest ones to give out to other employees for their home systems)
2. Buy 2 or 3 1TB HDD's
3. Install them in a box.
4. Done.
Start with the shear cost the additional equipment, then add in the cost of the electricity to run the drives and their controller. then add in the cost of HVAC to keep the room they are in cool. Will by far exceed the cost of 2 or 3 1TB drives. Not to mention the cost of your time to build, deploy and maintain.
In short. Nothing you can do with these drives will save your employer money. However proper recycling might bring in a buck or two. Not to mention the good will when you hand the largest drives to fellow employees to use at home.
About $1000/year energy alone to operate (Score:5, Interesting)
You said 100 drives ranging 20-300GB... that doesn't tell us much about the total capacity, but let's say it's 10TB. A terabyte disk costs less than $200 these days, a 4-port SATA PCI card can be had for $40, so with two of those and the 2 SATA ports on any cheap mobo you have a system that'll serve up your 10TB for $2000, two years of just the energy cost of your 100 disc system.
And that's not counting the headache of building your 100 disk array, the maintenance cost, and the reduced capacity due to inevitable failures with such a large number of older discs.
In short, although a cool project in theory, in practice it's not worth it today. A few years ago it would have been, but the price of storage has just dropped too steeply in the last couple of years.
I work with a group that "recycles" old machines in a developing country to provide access to young people who couldn't afford it otherwise, and even here, with free (donated) hardware it's hard to beat the falling price/performance curve of computer hardware these days. Although we could use your discs... discs (and memory) are shortest in supply. If you want to donate them to us, drop me a line.
Hard drives? We need hard drives! (Score:5, Insightful)
We refurbish computers and put them in the homes of low-income people, nonprofits, churches, senior centers, etc. We always need drives, and late-model computers to keep our refurbishers busy. We are a nonprofit and feel that this is an important way to bridge the digital divide.
I don't know where you're located, but we would love to have those drives, and will wipe them to Mil-spec and reuse them. that keeps them out of landfills (good for the environment) and puts good computers into the homes and tech centers of low-income communities (good for our communities and your kharma). We'll pay shipping if you would like to donate them to us.
Check us out on the web at www.ReliaTech.org. and give me a call at 510 236-7000 to discuss donating those drives and/or computers.
By the way, that donation gives you a tax deduction, too.
thanks!
Ben
Re:Thumper (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Thumper (Score:5, Funny)
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1 word: magnets (Score:5, Interesting)
You could build a climbing suit for climbing steel, build a generator,....
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Re:1 word: magnets (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:1 word: magnets (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:2 Words... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:100 ata hard drives? forget going green (Score:5, Funny)
power_to_run_100_hard_drives = 100 * power_to_run_1_hard_drive
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Re:100 ata hard drives? forget going green (Score:5, Informative)
500-800W to run 100 HDDs. Some PCs use that much alone. Even these days, it's still worth using older HDDs, because the cost of replacing them with bigger and more energy efficient ones is still not low enough to cover the cost of running an older drive for a few years. Especially if your NAS supports power saving.
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Re:100 ata hard drives? forget going green (Score:5, Insightful)
You need the fans, you need an extra controller card for every 4 of them, the mainboards, etc.
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Re:Earn a little extra on the side (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:magnets (how to keep them?) (Score:5, Informative)
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