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If you have hard disks that are no longer big enough or fast enough for your primary storage needs, there are still plenty of ways to make them useful.
Until recently, I automatically went shopping for a drive enclosure for my old hard disk. However, it’s not the only way to find new life for old drives. If you decide to go the enclosure route, look for the following features:
Low cost. Don't spend more than $20-30 for an enclosure for an ATA/IDE drive. Newegg, for example, offers a number of ATA/IDE enclosures with USB 2.0 ports for around $20 each, including some with fans. Spend much more, and you’re getting close to the cost of a 500GB 3.5-inch external drive. This enclosure from Coolmax converts ATA/IDE drives to run on USB/IEEE-1394/SATA (not eSATA):
Performance. If you're moving up to USB 3.0 and you're trying to recycle SATA 3Gbps hard disks, get a USB 3.0 enclosure (they're about $40 or so at Newegg).
Flexibility. If you're moving an SATA hard disk to an enclosure, get an enclosure that supports both USB 2.0 and eSATA, so you can plug it into a wide variety of systems. Once USB 3.0/eSATA enclosures hit the market, they’ll be a good choice for your SATA 3Gbps drives. This Antec enclosure features active cooling:
Already have enough external drives for the foreseeable future? Consider these other ways to give old storage new life.
If you have a couple of identical SATA or late-model ATA/IDE drives and a motherboard with RAID support, you can create a RAID array to make two drives a single logical unit. Use RAID 0 for a system/apps drive that cranks up performance thanks to data striping, a RAID 1 mirrored array that automatically mimics the contents of one drive with another, or, if you use a system with a late-model Intel chipset with RAID support, look at Matrix Storage, which gives you the speed of RAID 0 and the data protection of RAID 1 with two drives, or the speed of RAID 0 and enhanced data protection of RAID 5 with a four-drive array. Keep in mind that if you create an array with two drives of different sizes, your array is 2x the size of the smaller drive (RAID 0) or the size of the smaller drive (RAID 1).
Windows Home Server is an excellent choice for recycling old computers and slightly-past-their-freshness-date storage devices, both internal and external. When you connect additional drives to a system running WHS, it automatically adds them to the storage pool. Microsoft also offers trial CDs so you can give WHS a spin.
WHS isn't the only game in town, though. There are a number of easy-to-use freeware network servers apps based on Linux or FreeBSD that we've covered previously, so look them over.
If you don't want to add another computer to your home or small business, but want extra storage, don't overlook data storage appliances such as Drobo, PogoPlug, Promise Technology's SmartStor Zero NS2600 and others. Most of these are designed to work as network storage appliances (Drobe requires an add-on), so you'll get better performance by connecting them to a Gigabit Ethernet network switch in a wireless router.
Another good home for old PC storage is a media streamer. We reviewed the new Digital Entertainer Elite EVA9150 from Netgear recently and noted its ability to support external USB storage devices.
Some of the other players in the field include Popcorn Hour (supports SATA and USB drives), Patriot Memory's Box Office Media Player (supports 2.5-inch SATA SSD and HDDs and USB drives), and Iomega's Multimedia ScreenPlay TV Link (supports USB drives, flash drives and Iomega REV drives).
Comments are closed on this article
MasterHacker
February 01, 2010 at 11:59am
You could use an old drive to test differnt software/operating system combinations.
You could use an old drive for backups only connect it internally.
rcolbeck
January 28, 2010 at 6:34pm
I have a concern with WHS storage pool. While it's awesome way to gain storage space with several unmatched HDDs, it also may create problems if one HDD fails. Will some data get corrupt? Will we be able to predict and pinpoint which HDDs will fail.
I understand that there is ultilites for this but they are not fool proof. Also if we get a warning that HDD 2 is failing. Will there be a utility telling me which data is on HDD 2 so I can move them to HDD 1 or HDD 3 and then replace HDD 2?
For storage, I cannot go without Raid 1 or Raid 5 solution. Not many people realize that while the write performance with Raid 1 is normal the read performace is increased because of reading from two HDDs at once.
Adeptus_Mechanis
January 28, 2010 at 6:08pm
Under capacity cutoffs you said See "Safe Drive Recycling and Disposal" for details. Was that supposed to link to something? Cause if it was, the link doesn't show for me. Not a big deal to google it, but I was wondering what MPC specifically recommends for recycling old HDDs.
Metalmorphasis
January 27, 2010 at 8:04pm
I always use my drives until they spin no more, and or use them for archival storage.
Pentium 0
January 27, 2010 at 6:34pm
You could also make a server using unRAID if you have a couple HDDs.
