So /g/, I just pulled this little baby out of one of the old PCs I had lying around the house, and I was wondering, has anyone else had any issues with re-using old HDDs?
I don't really need the space, but an extra 600 GB couldn't hurt.
I have a friend who hooked his old HD up with a SATA/USB adapter and it's worked fine. However, he only really uses it to store images,music and videos. He hasnt tried putting anything too major on it yet.
>>52499482
Yea, I'll probably just use it for old games, movies, images, and other shit I don't want using up space on my main HDD.
>>52499446
I use a decade old HDD for backup of my main SSD and to run a Linux OS, it's slow but just werks.
>>52499446
Only drive failures I've ever seen are the occasional 10K that's been running long and hard in a server and of course mishandled/dropped drives, also some stiction issues on the really old shit. I can show you plenty of drives that still run after 20-30 years though.
>>52499553
As a follow on, from my experience most drives that are going to fail do so in the first year or two of use, if it survives past that it's usually good for another 10 or more as long as you aren't throwing it at shit.
>>52499446
Can't you plug it in and check the S.M.A.R.T. info?
If it was stored safely, it should be just as good as when you last used it (including the data, as opposed to SSDs which suffer amnesia after being unpowered for comparatively short amounts of time). Just make sure to allow it to warm up to room temperature before powering it up (if it was by any chance stored in an unheated room such as an attic/basement/etc.). Powering up a literally cold HDD can have disastrous results.
>>52499612
>>52499602
Looks like everything's good to go.
Seems like it's my brother's old HDD from his last build, he doesn't need it so looks like I'm good to wipe it.
>>52499959
>>52499602 is right, you may want to check its SMART info first before putting data onto it. While its shape shouldn't have degraded in any way while it was in storage, you probably don't know for sure if it didn't have any problems before.
>>52500063
Alright, I'll get right on it.
Thanks for the info.
>>52499446
600 GB swap
>>52499959
Wait op do this, install an ext4 driver and format the hdd to ext4, you can get the driver here:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2fsd/files/
It works with win7, I didn't test with 8 and 10 though so it might not work, but you got nothing to lose anyway since you wanna format it I guess, it's worth a try in my opinion, ext4 is faster than ntfs.
>>52500100
>use and old and slower HDD for swap
Yea, no. His idea of using it for storage of less needed/accessed stuff is probably much better.
