SATA spinning HDD's Breeding at Night....

[Topcat]

Once upon a time, I'd have killed for a stash like this....but today, they're pretty worthless.

These plastic bins contain 92 spinners ranging from 500gb to 4tb...





These two cardboard boxes are packed as full as they can get with another 90 spinners from ~73gb to 320gb.



This bin contains ~88 that I was contractually obligated to DOD wipe and also physically destroy....



I don't count my stash of SCSI, SAS, and IDE; as those are kept for other things. Everything spinning SATA under 320gb I am probably going to just give away. They all passed wiping without errors, but I'm not going to waste time checking the SMART data on each one. The ones that failed wiping were destroyed as well. As time goes on, the 500's will also be disappeared as well...

So, is it just me? ...or is everyone's stash of spinners doing this too?

[dmill89]

Re: SATA spinning HDD's Breeding at Night....

I know the feeling, I have a similar infestation, albeit on a bit smaller scale. Aside from some large storage drives (the 4TB storage drive in my main desktop and a pair of 6TB drives in RAID 1 in my NAS), I haven't put a SATA spinning HDD in anything in years (though I recently bought a NOS 40GB PATA drive to replace the failing one in my Windows 98 laptop), and the <1 TB drives are pretty useless given how cheap SSDs have gotten.





I'm even starting to run into a similar situation with older/lower-capacity (<=256 GB) SSDs, though these at least have a decent chance opt being repurposed (most likely replacing a spinner HDD in an old laptop, though the low-capacity NVMe drives are more difficult to find a use for, since they aren't compatible with older systems and the low capacity isn't much use in newer ones which generally have a drive that size or larger already):

[Topcat]

Re: SATA spinning HDD's Breeding at Night....

I have a decent stash of 120~250gb SSD's, although they always tend to get used....like you said, upgrades for older laptops. I also have some 30gb & 60gb SSD's, those are great for HTPC's where the data isn't stored locally (all it needs to hold is the OS) and some little ITX systems that are used for running powerpoint presentations for a local advertiser.... He hasn't even filled one of the 30's up yet!!

[eccerr0r]

Re: SATA spinning HDD's Breeding at Night....

Wish I had a way to get them to multiply as long as they're >= 500GB ... though fortunately I have many more SATA disks >=500GB than <500GB. Vast majority of my < 500GB disks are PATA.

Mainly using them for data backup. RAID has been dealing okay with their size and potential failure limitations.

[Topcat]

Re: SATA spinning HDD's Breeding at Night....

Everything in the plastic bins are 500gb+. Anything smaller are in the cardboard boxes, waiting for the right sucker....err, I mean person to lug 'em off!! a 500gb spinner in a Linux system is actually ok performance-wise....not SSD snappy of course, but for a cheap usable system, its fine. The 1tb+ drives are good for backups; like you said...and RAID's....but I still have way too many of them!

[lti]

Re: SATA spinning HDD's Breeding at Night....

If drives multiplied for me, they would probably be dead 2.5" drives. I still only have two "good" drives that aren't in a computer, and one of them took a while to spin up the last time I used it. It would be nice to get a good low-capacity 2.5" IDE drive for one of my old laptops that wouldn't POST with a 60GB drive (it locked up while detecting drives).

What does breed at night is Pentium MMX 200s. I keep running into them in piles of old computer parts, and I never take them. One is enough, especially since the best motherboard I have for that type of CPU is dead (I might try to fix it some day when I decide to get a spare ATX power supply).

[eccerr0r]

Re: SATA spinning HDD's Breeding at Night....

Technically I think I can still use any size drive, was doing some accounting of how much data/storage I was using not counting redundancy, but seems not that much - only a few (i.e. single digits) TB and most of it is on one machine - my PVR. Big files are only a few GB so even smallish disks are okay, can still work with 250 GB disks easily, anything smaller probably needs to be volume managed or RAIDed.

[Topcat]

Re: SATA spinning HDD's Breeding at Night....

If drives multiplied for me, they would probably be dead 2.5" drives. I still only have two "good" drives that aren't in a computer, and one of them took a while to spin up the last time I used it. It would be nice to get a good low-capacity 2.5" IDE drive for one of my old laptops that wouldn't POST with a 60GB drive (it locked up while detecting drives).

What does breed at night is Pentium MMX 200s. I keep running into them in piles of old computer parts, and I never take them. One is enough, especially since the best motherboard I have for that type of CPU is dead (I might try to fix it some day when I decide to get a spare ATX power supply).

For 2.5" IDE situations, do yourself a favor and get these: https://www.ebay.com/itm/151519954907

Stick a Mini PCIe SSD in it and run with it. 64gb and 128gb are cheap and size-specific to hardware of the era. XP and Win2k scream with these. I gave up ages ago trying to find 2.5" IDE spinners that were acutally still good. I have an old Dell laptop with WinXP on it, that has serial & parallel ports. Great for console programming uses....

[eccerr0r]

Re: SATA spinning HDD's Breeding at Night....

Next problem is the 8G or 32G limit that old firmware chokes on, which apparently Iti is alluding to. Not sure if the adapters have a way to lie about capacity, just to get past BIOS.

I too ended up seeing a pile of dead 2.5" PATA drives which is unfortunate, currently have a pile of 3 in my dead disk pile.

[Topcat]

Re: SATA spinning HDD's Breeding at Night....

You can get the mini PCIe cards as small as 2gb....they're alittle harder to find though. I did a NT system with one (2gb)...and I've never seen NT boot so quickly!

[dragos2009]

Re: SATA spinning HDD's Breeding at Night....

for the ssd's buy external caddys and use them as hella fast usb thumb drives

[lti]

Re: SATA spinning HDD's Breeding at Night....

For 2.5" IDE situations, do yourself a favor and get these: https://www.ebay.com/itm/151519954907

I have the M.2 version in another laptop. The JMicron chips don't work well with VIA chipsets (they're really slow), but it would probably work in the laptop with the capacity limit (it apparently just uses a 440BX chipset) if I get a small enough SSD.

Next problem is the 8G or 32G limit that old firmware chokes on, which apparently Iti is alluding to. Not sure if the adapters have a way to lie about capacity, just to get past BIOS.

That one doesn't have any way to limit capacity.

[Uranium-235]

Re: SATA spinning HDD's Breeding at Night....

I have a buttload but goddamn nothing like you. Larger ones like 4TB can be used for server arrays but something tells me you already have larger SAS 15k ones in there

Mine are spread over my room and workroom. Lot of laptop ones

You can partially thank windows 10 for this. It's I/O is so heavy using it with a spinner is basically impractical.

[Topcat]

Re: SATA spinning HDD's Breeding at Night....

^
I also have a bunch of Dell Optiplex 330's shelved in the garage I haven't even gone through yet. They've been here quite a while, but there's nothing top secret on them...so I just didn't get in a rush to strip 'em. Most are XP/Vista born and upgraded to 7 & 10. Odds are they're packing even more sub-250gb slowpokes....but I agree, Win10 and up definitely one of the root causes. Win7 ran nice on a spinner but ran fantastic on a SSD...but wasn't required for a decent running/responsive system....this can even be said for 8/8.1...but 10? SSD is a requirement for it to not be absolutely agonizing slow.

[CapLeaker]

Re: SATA spinning HDD's Breeding at Night....

I have also accumulated a lot of regular HDDs and laptop HDDs. Unfortunately Zero used SSDs. Oh well… the only disks spinning are in my server. That’s it. I recently picked up a new 500gb ssd for CAD$40. I should have gotten a bunch, but then I would be stuck upgrading computers for a month… suffer colleges at work… suffer! As long a my shit works, I am fine…