what to do with old IDE drives?

[Genesius]

So, like many I have loads of old IDE drives, but I have about 6 that are 300-500gb that id like to still use.

All work fine and are just from old rigs that I have here.

Suggestions please. I was thinking of buying a few ide >sata converters and running a sata raid array using a pci card. that way I could have a bigger server back up.

not too worried about it going down as the chances of losing my server drives and my back up at the same time are slim and the server only backs up all the pc's anyway. so I would still have pc copy, server copy ide/raid server back up.

any other ideas or thought would be much appreciated.

thank you

 

[dugdiamond]

i keep alot of mine
many of the people i know still live in the dark ages and have PCs that still use IDE

because they cannot afford to upgrade (or do not see the need too), they often find themselves in trouble when they computer crashes or the IDE HDDs give in! this is where i come to the rescue.

i have a universal HDD external USB PnP docking peripheral.
it is able to be mounted with ANY HDD drive(s).
it is a life saver. their systems (and often data) can be saved quite easily.

this, along with several old drives i have laying about the place, act as temporary storage/backup system IF i run of of optical blanks CDs/DVD/BDs.

with your idea though... i doubt very much that running 'old' IDE drives in RAID would be benificial, as the speeds would be awful PLUS 'old' drives are more likely to get FUBAR'd (ruining the entire array along with all data stored upon them).

best use..... use them as 'temporary' rewritable backups

 

[Genesius]

That's a good idea but I have around 3tb of old drives so I doubt I will ever use it as temp storage. I do already have a 2.5 inch IDE drive in an enclosure that I use for that that I had forgotten about.

It's not really worth selling them so that's not an option. The drives aren't old, I mean they have all been barely used, a couple I don't think have even been a system. They were bought for an old pentium 4 system I used to run but then I changed it to atom, and now they aren't needed.
The only reason I thought of using them as a back up was because then speed would t matter.

I don't want to waste them because they all still work and I can't bare to just throw them out.

 

[Timeless]

I know someone who opened them and uses the shining platters as Christmas decoration

 

[Genesius]

h aha ha, not really what I had in mind.

 

[alienware]

SATA to IDE converters are pretty shoddy tbh. I bought some before and the read and write speeds were terrible (20/8 lol).

USB enclosures would be the best idea IMO. I run a couple of SATA to USB internal headers in my rig so I could add extra HDDs and I just use them to download onto. These particular ones I have work with IDE too but I've not tried it.

 

[dugdiamond]

as i said...use them for TEMPORARY backups

OR

chuck them in the bin

 

[mrapoc]

I hate clutter. Binned mine

 

[grassman]

External Storage

 

[FredEx]

I jump on the external storage bandwagon. That was what I did. I have one set-up with a lot of trouble shooting stuff. I go over to my sister's to clean 10,000 pieces of crap off her system for the 10,000th time, I take the external drive with me as my "tool box" of goodies.

 

[SeekaX]

i wasn't even aware of that 500GB IDE HDDs were common.
anyways, backup, trash or christmas decoration

 

[iBeInspire]

I sold all of mine when I built this rig, but had I know better I would have also used them as xmas decorations ^_^ (This is the owner of a 8800GT and 8600GT keyring )

 

[Rastalovich]

An option for some people is to buy a caddie for them, with either usb/firewire/eth. An additional option is to then attach them to a home server for repeat copies of certain files, like family photos, documents, mp3s. Usually more than big enough for that.

 

[Wraith]

i wasn't even aware of that 500GB IDE HDDs were common.
anyways, backup, trash or christmas decoration

I still have 2 500Gb IDEs they used to be quite common in older external drives but do make for good back up hardware.

 

[SuB]

Bit of a necro there Rast?