Ask HN: What to do with excess 2.5“ HDDs

1 pointdeevus1 comment

I have a small pile of notebook hard drives of varying sizes that I'm not sure what to do with.

They work fine. I pulled them out of laptops that I upgraded to SSDs.

Other than turning them into portable hard drives by putting them in an external enclosure, what are some ideas?

I take my old drives and put them in a RAID1 btrfs volume that serves as large back-up volume consisting of miscellaneous drives. I only need that volume when my main drives fail, and then one other drive in the btrfs volume fails. Seemed like a good idea years ago.

Nowadays after watching the btrfs mailing list, I think the day I have to test the RAID1 redundancy will be like Russian roulette.

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