Used hard drives

[kc8adu]

Re: Used hard drives

i use hdtune and speedfan.
watch smart with speedfan and zerofill with hdtune.
if the drive is sick the benchmark will show huge dips in throughput.

i would also reuse them as long as they test good
slightly of topic but whats the best free or paid software you guys are using to test used drives with cheers

[NormanSaxon86]

Re: Used hard drives

I find any Hard Drive more useful then not having it. I store Pictures and Music on small hard drives and use them for doc. It is nice to have a hard drive from your old pc and use it in your new one so you can have like your old pc in you new one.

[everell]

Re: Used hard drives

I have built several "older" computers to use for long term testing of power supplies. I use Ubuntu as operating system since it is free instead of paying money to Microsoft. As for used hard drives, 6 gig and above is adequate. One thing I found that was interesting.....a hard drive that gives trouble with windows o/s will load Linux and work fine. So why trash it????

[ratdude747]

Re: Used hard drives

I have built several "older" computers to use for long term testing of power supplies. I use Ubuntu as operating system since it is free instead of paying money to Microsoft. As for used hard drives, 6 gig and above is adequate. One thing I found that was interesting.....a hard drive that gives trouble with windows o/s will load Linux and work fine. So why trash it????

Ive noticed that too... mac os also complains...

my guess is that linux doesn't complain... but it will error out eventually. it always has in my experience... usually something random will not work right, even after re-installing the OS... only to be fixed by a new HDD. IMHO if the drive isn't happy under windows like that, then the drive is junk... You never win in the end.

[dood]

Re: Used hard drives

I consider 80gb the lower limit. Anything under that is typically old, slow, and has less cache than 80 and above.

[Shocker]

Re: Used hard drives

I'd usually go for a 40GB 7200.7 over a 60GB Barracuda ATA IV. The ST340014A in particular is really quiet. I'm sure a later generation 40GB drive like the ST340014A would be quite capable of running an office system even today, and an early generation 80GB drive like the Maxtor DiamondMax 80 may well be a poor choice for anything.

[momaka]

Re: Used hard drives

I re-use all of the hard drives that I get. If it's above 3.2GB and working, it's usually good enough to set up a Windows XP test system. For a system that I would be using (i.e. not a test system) 20 GB is the absolute minimum. Not counting movies, games, and some other large downloads, I think my data (pictures, music, documents) would actually fit on a 20 GB HDD.
As for broken HDDs - I keep those as well, usually for power supply dummy load.

[Amraks]

Re: Used hard drives

I reuse drives for any type of server I may setup.
I have a mythtv setup running on a drive that sounds like its about to go any day.
I don't really care if it does, because the content will only be backed up onto portable harddrive.
Plus mythtv would eventually wear out a good harddrive if your watching livetv from it.

For my download machine headless server, I use a 2nd hand drive to install linux ubuntu server, then different drives for where data is saved, so if something goes wrong with my linux install its just a matter of reinstalling linux to gain it back.