What Do You Do with Your Old/Small External Hard Drives?

ihbh on 30/05/2017 - 22:24
Last edited 30/05/2017 - 22:25

I recently bought a WD 16TB My Cloud EX2 Ultra NAS, which is really 8TB with a backup.

As I was cleaning my desk today, I dusted off 2x 3TB WD, 2x 3TB Samsung, 2x 2TB WD, 2x 1.5TB Seagate, 2x 1TB Seagate, a 1TB WD and a 0.5TB Lacie external drive. I've been moving data from these drives onto the NAS. Boy were there a lot of cables to untangle and clean!

I plan on using these drives as an offsite backup and giving some to relatives who probably don't do any backups.

Out of curiosity, have you been consolidating to bigger capacity drives, and what do you do with your older/smaller drives?

Computing

Comments

  • [Deactivated] on 30/05/2017 - 22:28
    +1

    Take the lid off and watch them dance. Had a 5 1/4, 20MB once. Used those platters as ninja stars.

    At work we used to take the neodynium magnets and permanently screw each others' CRT monitors with gauss.

  • djkelly69 on 30/05/2017 - 22:33
    +2

    Not this

    • [Deactivated] on 30/05/2017 - 22:44
      +2

      Hard to cash out that much BTC in the first place

  • [Deactivated] on 30/05/2017 - 22:44
    +1

    OP I'll take the 3 and 2 TB drives

  • KitchenSink on 30/05/2017 - 23:49
    +1

    Well you could build your own NAS with all those spare drives. Open the case up and pop out the drive and use it in a Synology NAS or something to backup your WD 16TB one. Doesn't have to be all the same drives or speeds using the Synology SHR. It can be used for offsite backup maybe?

  • garetz on 31/05/2017 - 02:26
    +1

    Ive still got my 200gig ide drives somewhere.

  • EightImmortals on 31/05/2017 - 07:28

    Pull them apart and get the best fridge magnets ever.

  • ESEMCE on 31/05/2017 - 08:09
    +1

    hehehe, these are not "Small"!
    I replaced the DVD ROM drive in my laptop with a $10 eBay HDD caddy and installed my unused 340Gb drive as a storage drive.

    The biggest portable drive in our house are 1Tb!
    I just don't have that much important data I guess.

  • Sunny84 on 31/05/2017 - 08:18
    +1

    I've used a few spare portable hdd's on our TV's for time shifting/recording.

  • Dancasper on 31/05/2017 - 08:33

    Have the same problem with usb flash drives. I seem to have accumulated about 20 or so of 4-8gb's.

    Your drives aren't that small, I wouldn't donate them to landfill or turn them into trinkets just yet (wait till they die). Despite the NAS storage, you could build a;
    Kodi box/ media centre
    Jukebox (Vortex box)
    Buy a fat PS2 with sata adapter and install your backup PS2 library of games to the hdd…
    Ditto above with the original xbox..

  • akd on 31/05/2017 - 08:52

    If these (1-3 TB) are small what should I call my 250 Gb hdd and 40 GB hdd - Tiny.. lol
    You should put it on sale on GumTree or Ozbargain Classified. I recently bought 3 TB otherwise I would have bought one of them.

  • Nugs on 31/05/2017 - 09:08

    Small? I'm still using the same 320gb 2.5" Fujitsu portable that I bought in late 2008 for $125.

  • geek001 on 31/05/2017 - 09:39

    Maybe you can turn them into a JBOD NAS? If you could find a computer to fit all the drives, I am sure you can setup something that might be even faster than your 8TB drive.

  • godofpizza on 31/05/2017 - 09:43

    ps3/xbox360 or ps2 if they're ide

  • bpop99 on 14/02/2019 - 11:35

    I put all my old drives into an unraid setup - which allows for multiple drives of differing sizes

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