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Spare drives: what can I do with them other than selling?

maxtch
By maxtch
in Storage Devices
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Posted

Here is a list of my spare drives:

  • Hitachi HDS721050CLA662 7200rpm 500GB 3.5-inch SATA (HP FRU)
  • WD Green WD20EARS 5400rpm 2TB 3.5-inch SATA
  • Toshiba MK5065GSXF 500GB 2.5-inch SATA (Apple OEM)
  • Hitachi HTS541616J9SA00 5400rpm 160GB SATA
  • Hitachi HTS542580K9SA00 5400rpm 80GB SATA
  • Toshiba MK8052GSX 5400rpm 80GB SATA

I can not sell them. What can I do with them then? I already have a 128GB USB stick and a 1TB USB HDD, so please refrain from suggesting me to make them into USB drives.

The Fruit Pie: Core i7-9700K ~ 2x Team Force Vulkan 16GB DDR4-3200 ~ Gigabyte Z390 UD ~ XFX RX 480 Reference 8GB ~ WD Black NVMe 1TB ~ WD Black 2TB ~ macOS Monterey amd64

The Warship: Core i7-10700K ~ 2x G.Skill 16GB DDR4-3200 ~ Asus ROG Strix Z490-G Gaming Wi-Fi ~ PNY RTX 3060 12GB LHR ~ Samsung PM981 1.92TB ~ Windows 11 Education amd64
The ThreadStripper: 2x Xeon E5-2696v2 ~ 8x Kingston KVR 16GB DDR3-1600 Registered ECC ~ Asus Z9PE-D16 ~ Sapphire RX 480 Reference 8GB ~ WD Black NVMe 1TB ~ Ubuntu Linux 20.04 amd64

The Question Mark? Core i9-11900K ~ 2x Corsair Vengence 16GB DDR4-3000 @ DDR4-2933 ~ MSI Z590-A Pro ~ Sapphire Nitro RX 580 8GB ~ Samsung PM981A 960GB ~ Windows 11 Education amd64
Home server: Xeon E3-1231v3 ~ 2x Samsung 8GB DDR3-1600 Unbuffered ECC ~ Asus P9D-M ~ nVidia Tesla K20X 6GB ~ Broadcom MegaRAID 9271-8iCC ~ Gigabyte 480GB SATA SSD ~ 8x Mixed HDD 2TB ~ 16x Mixed HDD 3TB ~ Proxmox VE amd64

Laptop 1: Dell Latitude 3500 ~ Core i7-8565U ~ NVS 130 ~ 2x Samsung 16GB DDR4-2400 SO-DIMM ~ Samsung 960 Pro 512GB ~ Samsung 850 Evo 1TB ~ Windows 11 Education amd64
Laptop 2: Apple MacBookPro9.2 ~ Core i5-3210M ~ 2x Samsung 8GB DDR3L-1600 SO-DIMM ~ Intel SSD 520 Series 480GB ~ macOS Catalina amd64

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Posted

Buy a hard drive dock and use them as removable drives?

 

I don't think I'd trust most of those aging drives with any sort of meaningful data and you don't really have any decently matched drives for a raid setup. Maybe buy or build a NAS?

 

I'd just toss the sub 500GB drives as they're pretty much paperweights and if you ever wanted or needed a spare drive you can always use one of the other 3.

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9 hours ago, Slayer3032 said:

Buy a hard drive dock and use them as removable drives?

 

I don't think I'd trust most of those aging drives with any sort of meaningful data and you don't really have any decently matched drives for a raid setup. Maybe buy or build a NAS?

 

I'd just toss the sub 500GB drives as they're pretty much paperweights and if you ever wanted or needed a spare drive you can always use one of the other 3.

You could use them in an UnRAID NAS but, if I was keeping them, I would just use them as bare backup drives, using a USB dock or a built-in trayless hot swap bay in the computer.

 

In my case, when I switched over to all SSDs, I gave the more than a dozen HDDs I still had to a friend of mine who could either use them (he was especially interested in the 4TB drives in the bunch) or could find good homes for them (I didn't want to bother with trying to sell them; selling things in the past didn't always end well and I'm too old for that nonsense).

Jeannie

 

As long as anyone is oppressed, no one will be safe and free.

One has to be proactive, not reactive, to ensure the safety of one's data so backup your data! And RAID is NOT a backup!

 

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