Also speaking of dead hard drives, now’s as good a chance as any to sort through some old drives left over from old systems, since I’ve now got a USB adapter (kind of like this one) that lets me hook up drives without having to open up the case.
Some of these are dead or dying drives that I didn’t want to immediately throw out because I wanted a chance to erase them first. My secret crab bisque recipe will never be yours, dumpster-divers! The drive I just replaced in this server actually crapped out completely while I was 3/4 of the way through erasing it, so it’s now relegated entirely to the role of ‘squeaky noise-maker’.
Some of them still work perfectly fine, but I’m not sure what to do with them yet. One is a 1TB drive, which is still a good amount of space, but it won’t fit into any of my current systems, and it’s too small to act as a backup drive to them. But it’s too (physically) big to use as an upgrade in my PS3. Probably the best thing to do would be to stick it in a USB enclosure and use it as a General Purpose Portable Drive ™. But then I’ve also got a 500GB drive left over. And a 320GB drive. And a 160GB…
And some of them are ooooold. In one box I found a dusty WD Caviar drive that’s 13 years old and is louder than every other hard drive I have put together, but amazingly enough it still works. But it only holds 30GB; what could I even use it for? And I’m trying to make my workspace quieter, not louder. But then my natural reluctance to throw out anything that might be useful in some theoretical way kicks in…