What do do with all my laptop hard drives?

I've accumulated quite a collection of laptop hard drives over the years. Seems that I should be able to do something useful with them. Would be nice to have a huge enclosure and use it as a JBOD drive for backup or extra storage or whatever. Anyone seen such a device supporting up to 10 drives?

 

I know the feeling...

I have 10+ drives within arms reach most are 160gb+ 7200rpm drives.

All my laptops have SSDs...

 

I've got from 320GB WD Blue to 500GB 7200RPM's. I think a 750GB or 1TB even, lol.

Maybe just sell them for a song and at least put a few bucks in my PayPal account. Same thing with RAM. Who knows how many 2x2GB DDR3 RAM chips I have, lol. Worth next to nothing, but even at $10 per pair at least it would be a little money in my pocket. I'm even ready to build a new home server from scratch. Doing it the right way will cost me over $2000, but could probably sell my current stuff for about $700. Sigh. Keeping up with tech is so damn expensive.

 

I'm popping my two laptop drives in my desktop to get 1.3TB total storage. I'm wondering if my girlfriend will let me keep her old laptop's 250GB WD as well

 

My case is worse, have some wifi adapters laying around when I upgrade to 5Ghz. try sell those... ralink, broadcom, eh

 

I'm in the market to buy a few laptop hard drives, preferably over 160GB. I would love a 320, 500, or 750 GB. Hell anything bigger than 160 really. I have been looking for some but I am not gonna pay $99 for a 320 GB. So if any of you want to sell some of them PM me and lemme know what you have and how much you want for them.

Sent from one of the many Anthropomorphic Personalities of the Disc

 

Put them into a huge RAID 0/5 array and pray. ^__^

I guess you could try to sell them, personally I would never buy a used mechanical HDD unless it was pulled from a brand new unit and was immediately pulled for like an SSD installation.

 

I'd say pretty much all of these are. From my own and other's new laptops who wanted bigger HDD or SSD. Even then if you have an older laptop with like 160GB or 200GB HDD and want 500GB and can buy one for $20 then why not? In any case not sure what I'm going to do with them. Will see.

I'm realizing RAID isn't all that it's cracked up to be at least from a consumer hardware standpoint. JBOD or RAID 1 are about the only RAID levels worth a damn, and with JBOD, you're just screwed if one drive fails.

 

RAID1, JBOD are still not easily/reliably transferrable if you're using hardware RAID.

With Windows 8's 'Storage Spaces', we finally have the software side in place to just keep adding drives to the 'pool' and let Windows worry about managing them (even with a RAID1 like level of protection with 2, 3 or more copies of your data at one time...).

Now; we just need the physical unit to throw them into... maybe this:

See:
AnandTech - Fractal Design Node 304 mITX Case Review: Paving the Way to the Future


I would love to see more suggestions for this 'issue'... I must have over 100 drives just laying around.


Oh, this was worth considering for $130 too (Black Friday sale and because of USB 3.0 support):

See:
FOXCONN nT-A3550 Nano PC Barebones System w/ AMD E350, Radeon HD 6310, DVI-I, HDMI (No O/S) at Memory Express


What's convinced me to keep it is support for 8GB RAM (which made if finally feel like a system from 2012...) - even though it is not spec'd/marketed with more than 4GB RAM anywhere (you have to try before you know - and yeah, I have a few 8GB RAM Sodimms laying around along with 160GB SSD's too...).

 

Good suggestions tiller!

I found this: Amazon.com: Mediasonic H82-SU3S2 ProBox 8 Bay External Hard Drive Enclosure with USB 3.0 & eSATA (Black): Electronics

Actually am considering that as my backup storage for my WHS as I start to migrate to doing it the "right" way. 5x3TB NON-GREEN drives on my WHS and whatever I need to back that up put in that case. Likely not laptop hard drives, but still it could be used for that. I like the idea of shoving 6 laptop drives in that other case though with a motherboard and make it a "smart NAS" of some sort for backups.

I also found a motherboard with 6 SATA III and 4 SATA II ports. Plenty of room for HDD's and no need for an add-in card.

 

Just mail them to me.......

 

Could send them off to somebody who'll try scanning the drives for sensitive information

In all seriousness though, donation to a charity is a possibility. Don't know who takes hard drives though.