What To Do With a Hundred Hard Drives? 487
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?"
2 Words... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Bunches of small drives (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't think selling them on ebay is a good idea. You never know what kind of data might be recoverable.
Honestly, if you can't use them in-house, then keep collecting them and let your replacement deal with the mess when you leave for another job.
AUction them off (Score:5, Insightful)
There really just a waste of company space and time.
Seriously? power requirements are high to scale. (Score:5, Insightful)
I feel ya (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
ATA over Ethernet (Score:2, Insightful)
Rail Gun (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
ZFS? (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
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.
Re:Earn a little extra on the side (Score:5, Insightful)
trash them (Score:1, Insightful)
Old drives = worthless
Re:Bunches of small drives (Score:4, Insightful)
Screw Ebay (Score:3, Insightful)
A lot of corporations are afraid that their systems contain priveledged info but since yours had large chunks of decompressed video, most of which has liscencing attached and has been released, you are in a unique position to provide HDs.
500 GB Hd's cost $100 buy 4, donate the smaller drives, and save the recyclers thounsands of dollars.
-D
Re:Not technically legal, but (Score:1, Insightful)
Repainting a vehicle releases a relatively large amount of toxic chemicals into the atmosphere.
Congratulations: because of your dislike of his vehicle's atmospheric pollution, you've just caused more atmospheric pollution. Who's the douche now?
Re:Bunches of small drives (Score:3, Insightful)
RAID controllers with 12 or 16 channels are dirt cheap on eBay now. Jeantech make some really cheap cases with good cooling and room for 12-16 drives. That would make an excellent NAS, if not for you for a charity or user group, and you have an endless supply of redundant drives to keep it going.
Just because a drive is old, does not mean it is unreliable. Drives do not age much when not in use and stored properly, and besides which you have enough for multiple redundancy (RAID 50 maybe?).
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.
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: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.
what else do you have available? (Score:3, Insightful)
1) Don't expect to use the smaller drives - turn the platters into coasters!
1) (a) If some of them are 7200rpm drives (or raptors), you could roll them out to individual workstations as swap space
2) Get all the 3.5" enclosures out of the old cases, attach together, put into some sort of sturdy frame. Voila, lots of 3.5" drive space. Find a motherboard which has 2 IDE connectors and as many PCI slots as you can find. And get stuffing them with IDE controllers. Now, you need a motherboard with a pci-express slot as well, and either onboard graphics or onboard gigabit LAN. Try for the former as onboard network adapters are notoriously flakey. You then get a PCI-express dual, or quad, channel network adapter.
With 4 PCI slots and the onboard controllers, you now have 10 IDE controllers = 20 drives (+1 new SATA drive for the system to run on). Pick the 20 best drives and fit those to your shiny drive rack. (If you don't fancy that, buy a new case, though I can't find any that will fit more than 18 drives (a Lian-Li), don't forget to get internal enclosures to fit extra drives in 5.25" bays). You'll also need to get a beefy power supply.
3) Do some totting up an realize that the whole scheme has cost substantially more than buying a bunch of new drives.
A few of the bigger drives may be good for medium storage requirements; see if you can buy your employer out of them if you want to build a MythTV box at home; but other than that, I'd say that you've saved yourself a turkey. Which is the basic rule of thumb when saving any consumer-grade hardware
Recycle them (Score:2, Insightful)
A search for "nextstep" on google may turn up a location near you.
Most of the equipment here came from Nextstep.
Computers, drives, hubs, switches , etc
Re:Unpopular choice: (Score:1, Insightful)
You could make a few (dozen) passes with Linux, or other *ix, doing dd's from
Then format the drives with ext3, build a Linux system on them and donate them to some organization needing to build a small server for a classroom, preferably in an impoverished third-world country, so they can make use of the OLPC's they're trying to educate their kids with.
Destroying them to reclaim the gold and/or the magnets should be considered a very last resort because the rest of the drive might or might not be recyclable for its raw materials and would probably add to an overburdened landfill.
Re:Bunches of small drives (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How About Just a Dozen? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Laptop Backup Drives (Score:3, Insightful)
These sizes are still useful for putting in external USB enclosures and using as a laptop backup drive (with something like Ghost).
How they screwed up?
A) You can't even easily do full drive images with it anymore
B) Where's the DOS based tools?
C) Even recovering from it's "backup" is a doomed failure without installed OS + Ghost.
Ghost is a ghost of itself from back when it was usefull.
Unless he works for the CIA... (Score:1, Insightful)
Unless you work for the CIA, the information on your companies drives can be safely destroyed simply be zeroing the drive. After the drive has been zeroed, the drive isn't going to be able to read the information any longer, a simple fact.
Is the information still there? BARELY! Sure, a drive recovery center *might* be able to recover some data by removing the platters and examining them with highly sensitive equipment, but really, the cost is so prohibitive.
Who's going to spend several hundred dollars to maybe recover a few pieces of Cindy's calendar from 2003? Not even Cindy.
Zero the drives and give them to people who could use them.
Re:Bunches of small drives (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:2 Words... (Score:2, Insightful)
e Bay ... well maybe.
Searching ebay for 3ware escalade cards, you may find some 8 ports or 12 ports IDE controllers. With this, you should be able to connnect 20-40 drives per PC.
Hard to find however, but often not so expensive (IDE cards are no more wanted).
After that, the last issue would be the power supply, but I guess this is just simple DIY.
That magnet prank will fail (Score:3, Insightful)
For the words to appear, the material separating the magnets from the iron filings would have to be unaffected by magnets; for example, if you put the magnets under a sheet of plastic or wood, then the iron filings will clump according to the placement of the magnets. On the other hand, if the fender is made of plastic, the magnets won't stick to it in the first place.
That's just my intuition; can anyone correct me on this?