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What do you do with your old external HDD'S ?

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TonyGamble

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Londoner here.

As part of my lockdown clearout I have come across a box of old external HDDs.

I have kept them as a precaution that some life threatening file has gone awol after two decades of upgrades but now feel confident that danger has passed.

There are probably about six and they are probably mostly 2tb.

Yes, they have data on them.

I could get a heavy hammer, bash the daylights out of them and consign them to the rubbish bin.

The problem about passing them on is that I really ought to 'clean' them and when I set Acronis on one of them it looked as if it was going to take days. I am told that simply formatting is not secure.

Then what do I do with them. I cannot imagine eBay will produce much and I really don't want to get into arguments with people claiming they found a bad sector.

I've asked a local charity and not got any real suggestion.

Does anyone here have any ideas?

To repeat - I live in London. So any reply needs to remember that.

Thanks in advance.

Tony
 
TonyGamble said:
The last poster suggested they might be of use for me. Before the sledge hammer is deployed does anyone have a suggestion for these six 2tb HDDs. Suitably wired through a good USB hub and a mains mutisocket adaptor I see a 12tb data storeage device lurking. But on the surface I am not tempted.
Click to expand...
No, I think they could be usable to folks who have a lot of lab machines where they screw with alt OSs or filer products or anything where they need a little bit of storage (small drives) but don't mind it if abruptly dies on them.

Same reason to keep 1-2gb usb flash drives.

So this would be effective 'recycling' to give them a bit more utility before they go down that e-waste rabbithole.
 
I`il pay for shipping and i`il also erase them properly. I don`t mind waiting, i got the time.

Gotta love free stuff!
Gotta love free stuff!
 
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gs85739az said:
"Most" metals inside your body are "non ferrous": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-f...rrous metals include,and alloys such as brass.

Some aren't:gadgets inserted in body with batteries,etc..tend to be magnetic..
Click to expand...
Surely you've heard of hemoglobin and iron poor blood?

The only metals more common, in order, are calcium, potassium, sodium and magnesium. Because the first three are so reactive, they're never found outside labs in their pure form. We don't usually even think of them as metals, although technically they are.

Yes, there are many other metal ions found in the body, but in vanishingly low amounts, like the cobalt in vitamin B-12.
 
If they are worth someone using (like 1TB), then if you have an old PC, make a DBAN boot USB stick or CD, and boot the old PC to DBAN and wipe the old drive. Even if it takes over night, just leave it running on the old PC, then move on to the next drive.
 
Any inexpensive external enclosure for multiple drives? Ideally, making all the drives appear as just one larger drive?

I also have a pile of no longer used 2T and 4T drives.
 
Multiple enclosure.

Good idea.

Some of my drives had become 'iffy'. My feeling is that it might have been the power in the enclosure rather than the disk itself.

Maybe something like a simplified raid enclosure would work for us. Bulk, for some of us, will not be a worry either.

Any ideas chums?
 
Can't find any USB drive holders like you suggest.

I did find this five drive RAID jobbie but it did seem rather unreliable according to the reviews. And I don't know enough about RAID maths to know whether with five 2tb drives I'd end up with a 10tb device.

Loading…

www.amazon.co.uk

Any comments folks?
 
Read a bit more about DBAN.

Not found how to make a boot USB stick yet but will do more reading. Good for the soul and the mind.

Tony
 
TonyGamble said:
Can't find any USB drive holders like you suggest.

I did find this five drive RAID jobbie but it did seem rather unreliable according to the reviews. And I don't know enough about RAID maths to know whether with five 2tb drives I'd end up with a 10tb device.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/TerraMaste...e&qid=1598705194&sprefix=5+bay,aps,136&sr=8-4

Any comments folks?
Click to expand...
According to the specs you can only combine two of the drives in a RAID array - the other three would be accessible as single logical drives.

You would end up with either 8 or 10 TB depending on whether you want to protect one pair of drives.
 
How about me putting four of my 2tb drives into one of these?

Loading…

www.amazon.co.uk

I would not get the RAID but I would get another 6tb drive - but maybe not worth the money?
 
TonyGamble said:
Read a bit more about DBAN.

Not found how to make a boot USB stick yet but will do more reading. Good for the soul and the mind.

Tony
Click to expand...
See the link in my earlier post.

It's actually dead easy.


"It's good to be . . . . . . . . . Me!"
 
TonyGamble said:
How about me putting four of my 2tb drives into one of these?

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07BJL7SP1/ref=ask_ql_qh_dp_hza

I would not get the RAID but I would get another 6tb drive - but maybe not worth the money?
Click to expand...
Looks like it would work. Might not be the cheapest way of doing it unless you had a use for the cloning feature - high speed backups perhaps.

If you put in four 2TB drives then your computer would see four separate 2TB logical drives not a 6TB drive.

Didn't you say they were external drives? What did you mean by that? What connections do they have - this device would need bare drives with SATA connectors.
 
Greybeard2017 said:
Looks like it would work. Might not be the cheapest way of doing it unless you had a use for the cloning feature - high speed backups perhaps.

If you put in four 2TB drives then your computer would see four separate 2TB logical drives not a 6TB drive.

Didn't you say they were external drives? What did you mean by that? What connections do they have - this device would need bare drives with SATA connectors.
Click to expand...
My bad maths. I meant an 8tb drive. I am not sure that seeing four separate drives gets me much further than putting the drives in a column and feeding them into a USB hub.

It would be so much better if the PC did see them as one 8tb drive but I guess that is going to be much more expensive.

Yes they are external drives. Either Seagate or WD. I was going to take them out of their covers. I assumed that would turn them into drives with SATA connectors. In fact one is already 'in the nude' and has a little gizmo attached that allows mains and USB to reactivate it. Probably bought it years ago when I wanted to recover something from an HDD that seemed reluctant to start spinning.
 
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TonyGamble said:
It would be so much better if the PC did see them as one 8tb drive but I guess that is going to be much more expensive.
Click to expand...
Yes - if you want a proper hardware solution - it would be something like this example (which is for 5 drives) - it would allow all sorts of RAID alternatives:

Loading…

www.amazon.co.uk

In your case I'd just hang on to the separate drives and use them where I want to store or backup something less than 2TB.
 
Thanks.

I don't want to pay £250 but that £70 interests me. I looked up that Windows 10 software and it seems that the software will turn the four 2tb drives into some RAID type configuration.

To be honest I do wonder whether I need it. I work with three 6tb HDDs that are constantly in one case and regularly in another copied to each other with GoodSync. One of those did get flakey a month ago but with two copies it was easy to move it out of the trio and introduce a new drive.

But I am learning something new all the time.

I am right that stripped out of their cases that £70 device will take the drives? The advantage of that is it would let me see which drives were simply iffy due to the case hardware and the actual drive was not at fault.
 
TonyGamble said:
Yes they are external drives. Either Seagate or WD. I was going to take them out of their covers. I assumed that would turn them into drives with SATA connectors.
Click to expand...
Not necessarily; of two I've disassembled, one had SATA connectors and the other had the USB 3 socket soldered directly to the circuit board.
 
Jestertheclown said:
TonyGamble said:
Read a bit more about DBAN.

Not found how to make a boot USB stick yet but will do more reading. Good for the soul and the mind.

Tony
Click to expand...
See the link in my earlier post.

It's actually dead easy.

"It's good to be . . . . . . . . . Me!"
Click to expand...
Yes, I remember it being super easy. I think you just have to find the USB stick installer and it will install it on a USB stick.
 
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