What to do with extra hard drives

Hey guys, hoping you can help me out. I have 3 extra notebook harddrives. Two 30 gb and 1 80 gb. Is there something cool I can do with these, such as any type of mp3 player, video player, etc.? I bought an external case for it so now they have a usb plug. I'm not super techie or any type of hacker, so mods aren't my thing unless there are really good instructions and not many tools necessary. Thanks for any ideas!

 

I would use all three hard drives to hold all my DVD's. Plug em all into a desktop computer, and hook it to a wifi router.
I got a really crappy laptop, put a usb bluetooth module and wifi on it, plugged it into my TV, and use it as a sort of DVD library (stream the movies from the desktop computer). Now with a bluetooth remote, I don't need to get up, plod that long 5 foot distance to the TV and switch cd's. Obesity Ensues.

Its annoying to get set up, and can take a while, but oh so worth it later on. Now I never have to look for DVD, check the DVD cases for a DVD that someone put into the wrong case, or have to wait through those damn front end credits that some DVD's and DVD players force you to sit through.
The downside? some of the copyright protections on certain DVD's prevent you from getting it on your hard drive (particularly any Disney movies).

Another use would be to use one drive for windows, and another for your swap file. Can really increase those load times/decrease slow downs in games if you don't have enough ram on your system and can live with some hard drive swapping.

In both these cases though you would need a special plug to plug more than one of the hard drives into a desktop computer at a time... considering this is a laptop forum, I don't imagine you have one handy.

Also in both cases, the process to do it isn't exactly intuitive. You would need to look up a guide online, or get a tech buddy to help you out.

Of course, you could also sell em on ebay, Craigslists, Kijiji or whatever.

 

I personally use the extra hard drives for back ups. If you have a 2.5" notebook HD, find an inclosure that operates on USB power so you can use it like a 'flash drive'. You can store ISOs of CDs or DVDs and store MP3s on them.

Be careful if you sell them off unless you over-write them several times over since data can still be recovered on them.

 

try this http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16855182001

or search for modix or similar products. they are usb enclosures that can also be plugged into a TV so you can watch movies. they also support lots of formats so there shouldnt be any codec issues.

 

Use the 30GB ones for OS backups, as in make an image of your OS and store it on them.

 

I have two 80GB 5400RPM notebook hard drives both in external 2.5" enclosures. This one I keep in my computer bag:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817145124
And this one is on my desk:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817392009

I use them both for backups and file storage.

 

Besides buying external enclosures and turning the extra hard drives into storage/recovery arrays, there are some other things you can try with the old hard drives (these involve not having the hard drive afterwards )

A. eBay (will definitely work for the 80 GB HD, but I doubt anyone will want to buy the 30 GB HD unless they're 1.8" form factors).

B. Sell off to a computer store. They'll take dirt cheap prices for that kind of old, used hardware, but hey, if you're not going to use the drives for storage or anything if you don't need them, why not get a little money back by selling off your old hard drives for $20 total?

 

What I suggest you do is that you buy a RAID enabled 3-HDD enclosure.

You can stick all three Hard Drives into the case, set up RAID, and then sell for a high price on the Internet to someone. People will definitely pay a high price for a versatile, safe backup device.

I quickly found this on newegg, but it isn't really what your looking for. What your looking for is something that is RAID enabled, and it's power supply, and has a range of External Interfaces, such as USB II, FireWire, and more Importantly perhpaps, SATA And eSATA.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817716028

The final thing you need to bear in mind is whether your hard drives use a Serial ATA (SATA) or an IDE interface. if you don't know, you can look at the connection at the side of the HDDs. If its IDE, then you'll have a long row of pins, like this:



If you have a SATA Interface, you'll have a much shorter connection.

This is important as the two Interfaces are not compatable with each other.

It may cost a lot of money to buy the enclosure, but if you can stick everything together, you could make a large profit.


Finally, if only two of your HDDs are of the same Interface (SATA or IDE), then you need to go with a Two HDD enclosure. You cannot go with a 3-HDD enclosure if all the Drives do not use the same Interface.

 

The above SATA picture is a SATA power cable. This is a SATA data cable: