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?"
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.
Play dominos (Score:5, Interesting)
Free Geek (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Re:Bunches of small drives (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Give them away (Score:4, Interesting)
One idea... (Score:2, Interesting)
One idea I've been tossing around in the back of my head for a while is a backup-to-disk device which is kind of a cross between a tape library and a raid enclosure. It would emulate a tape robot and drives so that normal backup software could talk to it, and would just power up drives as they are needed and read/write to them. The advantages are that there is no expensive robot with moving parts, only a few drives need to be powered up at once, the drives will probably last longer if they stay off most of the time, "tape seeks" would stay nearly instant, and you don't need RAID controller ports for every drive you have (just a switching fabric for routing the ports you have to the drives you want to talk to.)
It'd probably only be practical with SATA or SAS (fewer wires and availability of multiplexing chips).
Maybe someone can do me a favor and steal my idea so I can buy some hardware like this fairly soon. :)
Re:Thumper (Score:5, Interesting)
You won't get any hard drive space out of it... (Score:5, Interesting)
1 word: magnets (Score:5, Interesting)
You could build a climbing suit for climbing steel, build a generator,....
Setup 1 machine and USB/Firewire them (Score:3, Interesting)
or use the larger ones as customer throwaways - when the video needs to go to the customer and its really big - ship them a cheap usb/firewire enclosure with a disc in it loaded with their video - if it doesn't come back then you've got more to spare....
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.
Laptop Backup Drives (Score:3, Interesting)
These sizes are still useful for putting in external USB enclosures and using as a laptop backup drive (with something like Ghost).
Re:1 word: magnets (Score:5, Interesting)
Turn them into speakers (Score:4, Interesting)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fp4jQNa_9sY&feature=related [youtube.com]
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.
Re:Careful with the magnets (Score:5, Interesting)
I wish we would've had some nice hardcore magnets when that project came up!
Re:Shoot them! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Sort them and build software raid arrays (Score:3, Interesting)
Not just for the simple software raid and all that, but for the automatic block checksumming, something I would be concerned about with a big pile of really old drives.
Re:Bunches of small drives (Score:2, Interesting)
http://jwtioh.bluesonic.net/misc/gurthang/
That was an old setup with mostly 250GB IDE HDDs
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.
An Idea? (Score:4, Interesting)
Something like this.
http://www.novica.com/itemdetail/index.cfm?pid=121771 [novica.com]
The platters of could serve as the white squares maybe?
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
ZFS (Score:1, Interesting)
In fact, Sun's x4500 uses 48 off-the-shelf SATA hard drives for mission crtical storage.
Re:1 word: magnets (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Bunches of small drives (Score:5, Interesting)
Absolutely. My advice: there are open source designs [opencores.org] for processors, IDE adapters and gigabit ethernet controllers that can be loaded onto FPGAs. There's not a lot you need to know beyond this to go and do it yourself.
Re:1 word: magnets (Score:3, Interesting)
As you write, the fifferential form of Maxwell's equations contains: del * B = 0.
However that does not make Maxwell's equations entirely inaccurate in the event a (or many) monopoles are found. If you think about the above equation, it states that the total magnetic field through a closed surface is a net balance. In the world as we know it this is a correct equation. But if monopoles exist the zero would be replaced by a variable (say m for the imbalance in magnetic particles). This is similar to del * D = p describing the electric charge within a volume but with a calculation for the magnetic field. But since the known universe
So Maxwell's equations would require a very minor tweak to account for magnetic monopoles by changing to the equation del * D = m. Why don't we do that now? Becuase as far as we know based on our present knowledge of the universe, m always equals 0.
Of course there's nothing to say that the FSM hasn't intelligentily designed our part of the universe to hide the instances of m not equalling 0 from us....