I’m finally upgrading to a 1 TB SSD and i’m not sure what to do with the ol’ HDD. some say they convert theirs into an external drive which sounds easy enough, but are there other potential projects?
I use them for Jellyfin media storage, archival of things I’m afraid could be gone from the internet eventually (specific drivers, compiled versions of obscure projects, etc), and if you have even more, just set it as a clone backup of your SSD.
Same here. It’s important to preserve these things that can easily disappear from the internet forever. After the recent lawsuit with the Internet Archive for lending eBooks without the publisher’s permission during the Coronavirus pandemic, they may be in serious trouble and we might lose a significant amount of our recent history.
Data can disappear, so I constantly advocate for others to back up their stuff locally as well as online. Just doing backups through trusted services like Western Digital, Google, etc. can still lead to data loss, so it’s important to have a 3-2-1 backup strategy (3 backups, 2 physical backups in different locations, 1 online at a minimum). Just for the things you can’t afford to lose.
Western Digital customers who trusted the WD Live service to backup their data suddenly found that all their data was gone, without their permission: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/06/mass-data-wipe-in-my-book-devices-prompts-warning-from-western-digital/
Keep them in a box in my closet and tell myself I’ll use them for a storage/media server 🥲
No better day to start than today!
I don’t get a ton of use out of my Jellyfin server but it’s nice to have the option when I inevitably get tired of paying for streaming services.
Keep it in the PC as a secondary drive, you can move some gsmes to it which don’t really benefit from the SSD, or just move them so you don’t have to download them again.
It’s also great for media storage, playing movies from SSD won’t be any faster, and if you keep your PC powered on, you can setup a plex server or a network share, and access the movies from the TV for example. You can also make backups of your data from the SSD to the HDD, it’s not as good as a backup in a separate computer, but it can still protect your data in case your boot drive goes corrupt (because of Windows updates), or simply if you delete a file by accident.
If it works, put it in my media server PC,
if it doesn’t work, this
lol that’s a great movie!
I have all those HDDs and even some SDDs somewhere in a drawer thinking to use them somewhere in the future, while knowing full well that I’ll end up buying a new drive whenever I need one… 😅
Buy or make a nas/server. Good for backups, media, pihole, etc.
Some gaming consoles rely on the FAT32 file system to play backed up games. I typically use my old drives for that because of the limitations of FAT32 making them impractical for day to day use
Scrub them then reformat and fill them with definitely not pirated stuff and definitely not scraped reddit stuff.
If it’s a piece of junk, you can always rip it apart and pull out the magnets and use the rest for target practice.
If it’s a nice drive keep it in your computer for Media Storage / Game Storage.
Buy a small board computer (RPi or something similar) and turn it into a NAS on your local network.
Use it as a backup drive for your main drive/documents.
If they aren’t reliable anymore, you can pull the magnets.
Use veracrypt and then use it for my personal documents. Keep in a safe place incase something major happens to my house.
For HDD, I do a shred with about 30 passes, and then try to repurpose it into a server or it sits in a box.
Kinda overkill if you’ll be reusing it yourself anyway. I’d understand if you gave it away or sold it.