How to use 200 hard drives?

[TheAlyxGreen]

So I've come into possession of around 200 hard drives with 500gb of storage each and I'm trying come figure out the best way to use them.

 

It's enough storage collectively that I feel like there *has* to be a good use for it, but it's so little storage per drive that using a small number doesn't feel worth it compared to the multi-terabyte drives my computers already have and it's so many drives that I can't figure out how to use more than a tiny fraction of them at once.

 

I thought about getting a RAID card, but the biggest ones I see are only like 16 slots so I would need multiple, and I don't actually know if I can power that many drives at once with internal power anyway. There are external hard drive enclosures, but those are crazy expensive for very few drives.

 

I don't expect to use all 200 at once, just a lot of them. Seems like it would be a shame not to, after all. Any serious suggestions welcome. Also, I'm trying not to spend much money on this.

[tkitch]

are they 3.5 or 2.5" Drives?

 

[Meddler2.0]

Send one to 200 different people.

[LWM723]

Sell them. 200x$10=$2000, $20=$4000 and buy a new pc.

[LloydLynx]

Try 200 Linux distros. 

[8tg]

You could sell all the drives for 15$ a piece and have enough money for a small pc with 5 20tb drives, giving you the same overall capacity at 2.5% of the power and space requirements.

Not worth messing with them 

[Needfuldoer]

At only 500 gigs apiece, they're not worth the energy to run 24/7 in a NAS. A 16-bay server chassis would only hold 8 TB, but use more than 160 watts of power just to keep the drives going. Sell a few and buy yourself a couple large capacity drives if you want to build a NAS. (Just make sure to zero the drives out first.)

 

The best use case for those is offline cold storage. You've got plenty of drives there to make redundant redundant backups. Get a 5.25" trayless drive bay, or one of those toaster-style USB 3 drive docks, and go to town.

[TheAlyxGreen]

I've tried selling them in the past (I've had them for a few years but forgot about them until recently) and it's actually been pretty difficult. Very few people have the knowledge to install a new drive AND a need for a 500gb drive. That's the main reason I've been looking for a way to use them, because the other option seemed like discarding them.

 

I'll post them for sale again and see. If I sell them all for $20 I might be able to afford a GPU

[Blue4130]

3 hours ago, TheAlyxGreen said:

I've tried selling them in the past (I've had them for a few years but forgot about them until recently) and it's actually been pretty difficult. Very few people have the knowledge to install a new drive AND a need for a 500gb drive. That's the main reason I've been looking for a way to use them, because the other option seemed like discarding them.

 

I'll post them for sale again and see. If I sell them all for $20 I might be able to afford a GPU

It might just be me, but I think $20 for a used, very old 500gb drive will be a very hard sell.