I’m finally upgrading to a 1 TB SSD and i’m not sure what to do with the ol’ HDD. some say they convert theirs into an external drive which sounds easy enough, but are there other potential projects?
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Keep it in the PC as a secondary drive, you can move some gsmes to it which don’t really benefit from the SSD, or just move them so you don’t have to download them again.
It’s also great for media storage, playing movies from SSD won’t be any faster, and if you keep your PC powered on, you can setup a plex server or a network share, and access the movies from the TV for example. You can also make backups of your data from the SSD to the HDD, it’s not as good as a backup in a separate computer, but it can still protect your data in case your boot drive goes corrupt (because of Windows updates), or simply if you delete a file by accident.
If they haven’t failed, who couldn’t use extra storage? See how many you can fit in a case and make a rig for your backups why not
Leave them stashed away until I get a random request for a file many years later, by which time they are inaccessible
I moved it to my new PC with the plan of copying everything over to the new, bigger HDD as a backup for all the stuff that has followed my upgrade chain since 1995.
Then I put that off a couple months, and the old hard drive died.
It’s been a few years since that happened and I’m still so incredibly upset about that.
If it works, put it in my media server PC,
if it doesn’t work, this
I grandfather then through a number of systems. When it no longer makes sense: Secure wipe and donate, or drill through and dispose of.
I used to keep them forever, but ever since I got myself a NAS, i try not to let them accumulate.
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Good tip! I also encrypt all my drives - systems won’t even boot without a password.
Come to think about it, I haven’t taken a drill to any recent drive, but did a few phones and old tablets.
For work, the larger drives (4TB+) get used for archive storage alongside NVMe primaries. Everything else, at least those below 1TB used to get secure wiped then drilled but it got old fast as now we’ve got boxes and boxes of them going rusty in storage
I just use them as an extra drive so I can have more things on my system without having to delete things
Haven’t really used spinning disks for anything but my home NAS since 2010 or so. Which means all my old drives come out of the NAS… And either get cycled into my backup NAS or put into a multi-disk jbod enclosure that I use as “scratch” space for random data projects I’m doing on the side.
Ones that cycle out of scratch space are wiped and, if I’m being honest, sitting in a stack in my storage room. I really should stop procrastinating a trip to the recyclers…
hoard them. I have a stack of like 10 hard drives and 4 laptop hard drives. If I need one I move all the files off of it onto another.
Depends on the HDD. If they have bad SMART results or are too small, they get disassembled for the magnets. HDDs that still have some life in them are used for cold storage backups.
the magnets?
HDDs have fairly large neodymium magnets in them.
huh didn’t know that, neat
I just keep setting them up as external hard drives. I keep non demanding steam games on them.
If its big enough to still be of viable use(500gb+), I’d keep it in my PC and turn it into a data drive.
If its to small to bother continuing to use (<240gb), I’d just harvest the magnets out of it and destroy the disks.
Does anyone else find that things like this go faster if sold for a low, low price versus given away free?
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