I have around 50 old IDE hard drives. They range from 100MB to 320GB in size, most of them are 40GB or smaller. What do I do with them? I will never use so many hard drives and I don't even know when the number got so crazy. Is there a market for used IDE hard drives? I sure don't want to throw them away.
What were the largest IDE drives, 400 GB?
Is this too much voodoo?
wrote:What were the largest IDE drives, 400 GB?
I have a 500GB IDE drive in my old XP machine. Apparently large IDE drives are still sought after by console owners such as the first xbox 😁
Magnets-magnets-magnets...
Small IDE drives are perfect for DOS PCs. Given their age and limited longevity, I'd pick out the the ones in the 200MB-512MB range for old 486 and slower PCs, spinrite them, and put them in storage as emergency spares. I'd do the same with 2GB-8GB drives for Pentium PCs.
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Largest was 750GB from Seagate.
I also have at least 50 HDDs stored. Most are below 1GB. Only a few more then 10GB as larger aren't needed for old systems.
If you want to have period correct system you also need correct HDD. Do a full surface test and put them on sale on Amibay or eBay. I'm sure there is a market. I'm looking for Conner 42MB as it was in my first PC 😉 And only recently found a Conner CFA850A model.
Requests are also possible... /msg kixs
???? Is there such a thing as too many..
🤣
You can use them (depending on power usage) on ”fat” PlayStation 2, DVD-HDD recorders and some printers. Also you can get some kind of cheap HDD enclosure and use them as NAS device. With a Raspberry Pi you can use them as a personal web/FTP/database/cloud server or torrent/emule server.
Or you can sell them to other users.
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wrote:wrote:What were the largest IDE drives, 400 GB?
I have a 500GB IDE drive in my old XP machine. Apparently large IDE drives are still sought after by console owners such as the first xbox 😁
I guess they hacked the size limit in that case, when I replaced the xbox HD there was a 120GB limit,
the original hard drive on mine had 10GB but only 8GB being used (I think early xboxes had 8GB drives),
funny thing is that I used that 10GB drive from the Xbox in a PC I gave to someone;
I think 40 is too much, but having some stored for when the ones you use fail is probably a good idea, and yes, some people are crazy enough to buy old computer parts 😎
get an ide caddy and use them as ofline storage
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Sell them on Ebay.
For retro machines I try to always use some sort of flash storage if possible.
However, I have almost a full filing cabinet drawer full of spinning rust drives that I really need to go through and sell. Pretty sure I have tested them all at some point IF I didn't pull them from working machines.
Why do you come up with this topic now? 😉 I've recently bought a couple Seagate 40GB.
Old IDE / PATA HDD's are still great if you want to assemble a retro game pc and your intention is to sell it, because buying a SSD + PATA adapter or a similar solution is still quite expensive (if you buy new), money that you are unlikely ever going to see back when you sell the pc. Furthermore you don't need a 2.5'' to 3.5'' bracket with an old HDD.
I spent too much hunting down 120gb pata drives without the foresight to realize 120gb ssds would one day cost next to nothing 😁
Yep, i'm soon going to have the same problem...
Every time i manage to get my hands on another old pc, first thing is that i remove the hdd. I just don't have the heart to run those mechanical devices just so i could joke around with the old machines... (I replace them with CF card) And so i have also a small collection of 100MB - 10GB drives... Don't really know, what should i eventually do with them.
"640K ought to be enough for anybody." - And i intend to get every last bit out of it even after loading every damn driver!
60mb to 730mb IDE drives are still good and in demand for retro builders.
Conner drives have a nice retro ticking sound.
IBM drives are in demand.
Seagate and WD drives too.
The WD drives are fast and quiet.
Maxtor drives - These tend to good bad.
Quantum drives are good too.
Basically, if they still work there is nothing wrong with them and are good for DOS / Win3x
> IBM drives are in demand
Back in my day they were called the IBM DeathStar and not in demand at all.
wrote:> IBM drives are in demand
Back in my day they were called the IBM DeathStar and not in demand at all.
That was the DeskStar product line. The drives before that were fine.
Years ago I had a file server with eight IDE drives on a RocketRAID 454 controller. The drives were organized into two RAID5 arrays. I had about 2 TB of storage total IIRC.
Is this too much voodoo?
wrote:> IBM drives are in demand
Back in my day they were called the IBM DeathStar and not in demand at all.
My dad worked at IBM and brought home a DeskStar (75GXP?) in 2003 when we were running out of drive space. They must have been giving them away. It crapped itself every other day - I had to reinstall Windows three times in one week. Ended up losing 5 years of data 😢
I thought IBM was born with the world
Drives from Seagate, Samsung, Hitachi, and Maxtor can be trivially soft limited, so having some of those around is useful for older rigs.
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