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My place of work purchased 15 Lenovo Q-Series machines and 15 SSDs. They had me swap out all the SATA 3.0Gps 320GB (WD3200BPVT) Western Digital Scorpio Blue hard drives for the SSDs. So now I've got 15 WD mechanical drives sitting around. I'd like to do something with them on the cheap. I've looked at RAID enclosures on NewEgg and i take it only makes sense to RAID drives of 1TB or larger? Plus I presume their form factor (1.8") also works against them? Anybody got any ideas?

http://www.amazon.com/StarTech-com-1-8- ... B003V4TVB6

Instant, cheap portable storage.

Why aren't they set up to remain in those systems as backups? Whether you run with Windows Backup or you look at just storing a simple ISO or whatever, you've got a great opportunity to have your SSD's backed up in near realtime. Why not go that direction? Unless you have servers with small capacity needs, it seems to be a nice opportunity.

Captain Ned wrote:

http://www.amazon.com/StarTech-com-1-8-Inch-Enclosure-SAT1810U2-Silver/dp/B003V4TVB6

Instant, cheap portable storage.

+1. That's not really small capacity when it comes to a laptop drive. I have about fifty 40gb IDE drives, now THAT is a lot of small capacity HDDs !!! Anyone in the SE PA area interested in a metal drive shoot at the local gun range ?? Who needs clay pigeons when you've got all of those drives to fill with birdshot !

Walkintarget wrote:

Captain Ned wrote:

http://www.amazon.com/StarTech-com-1-8-Inch-Enclosure-SAT1810U2-Silver/dp/B003V4TVB6

Instant, cheap portable storage.

+1. That's not really small capacity when it comes to a laptop drive. I have about fifty 40gb IDE drives, now THAT is a lot of small capacity HDDs !!! Anyone in the SE PA area interested in a metal drive shoot at the local gun range ?? Who needs clay pigeons when you've got all of those drives to fill with birdshot !

Certainly sounds like my idea of a good time.

Make a wall/desk clocks out of them, or something like this... Then just give them away to your friends or sell on eBay or Etsy
Here's one example: http://www.engadget.com/2008/11/09/diye ... a/?m=false

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6817994147 - I've got a 4 drive one at work that I store my HD images on.

How small capacity?
http://imgur.com/r/pics/No3Yo

You might want to keep a couple of the hard drives intact, if you're going to use a Lenovo support contract, so you can say yes when the Lenovo tech asks if they machine is in its original configuration.

You can RAID the drives, but I wouldn't use them in anything more then a box to play around with. External HDs is probably the best solution, if you want to be productive with them.

heck, 320G is still a useable size for a 2.5" drive. If they are new pulls in working condition, why not sell'em on ebay. After ebay and paypal rape you off the final sale price you should still get back enough to get few more SSD.

+1 on that IBM HDD!

I say use the HDDs in a ZFS RAIDZ array for storing backups. You can never have too much backups.
I just built a nas using Nas4Free for archiving my projects / photos and it works wonderfully.