I’m finally upgrading to a 1 TB SSD and i’m not sure what to do with the ol’ HDD. some say they convert theirs into an external drive which sounds easy enough, but are there other potential projects?
Same here. It’s important to preserve these things that can easily disappear from the internet forever. After the recent lawsuit with the Internet Archive for lending eBooks without the publisher’s permission during the Coronavirus pandemic, they may be in serious trouble and we might lose a significant amount of our recent history.
Data can disappear, so I constantly advocate for others to back up their stuff locally as well as online. Just doing backups through trusted services like Western Digital, Google, etc. can still lead to data loss, so it’s important to have a 3-2-1 backup strategy (3 backups, 2 physical backups in different locations, 1 online at a minimum). Just for the things you can’t afford to lose.
Western Digital customers who trusted the WD Live service to backup their data suddenly found that all their data was gone, without their permission: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/06/mass-data-wipe-in-my-book-devices-prompts-warning-from-western-digital/
If they aren’t reliable anymore, you can pull the magnets.
Some gaming consoles rely on the FAT32 file system to play backed up games. I typically use my old drives for that because of the limitations of FAT32 making them impractical for day to day use
Keep them in a box in my closet and tell myself I’ll use them for a storage/media server 🥲
For HDD, I do a shred with about 30 passes, and then try to repurpose it into a server or it sits in a box.
