what to do with an old working hard drive?
 

switching two 500GB with two 1000GB ones in my PC.
the 500GB are still working and I don't want to throw or give them away.
what SHOULD I do with them? RAID_0 ? JBOD ? sell them ? I just don't want to waste them - what would you do ?

Leave whatever you are moving on there for a backup. What if your 1T dies.

just make a backup with private pics, documents or so :)

Sell them, or use for backups...

Don't use it just to use it. If some tech doesn't fit into your current needs, don't try to make it fit.

I have a dual xeon server I just retired, only because I didn't want it taking up precious space in my renderfarm that could be occupied by a single CPU computer that uses less power and runs faster.

As for selling hard drives, anyone that would buy a used one is a sucker. Mechanical hard drives would be at the top of the list of things you want NEW. You'd probably find somebody dumb enough to buy it -- even though you can get a brand new one for pretty cheap.

Go buy an external hard drive case with e-SATA or usb and just keep it as an external drive. That is the best way to do it because you can never have too many external hard drives. With a case costing 10~30 bucks it is a no brainer.

Agree with the back up option for sure...

Craigslist

You should keep those drives where they are for the OS and put in the other ones as disk space. If you are gonna keep them in, why switch it around if you already have the Os on there.

Backup drives as raid 0.

throw them in an external enclosure and keep them for backups or portable drives.

my media/torrent pc in the living room never has enough drives. 4 1tb sata internal drives and 4 500gb external drives. its handy to have a huge library of movies unarchived and ready to watch.

Sell them while they still have some value. Older drives use more power, are more likely to break down, take up more space, etc etc.

I should have mentioned I'm buying two 1000GB disks because one of them is the backup of the other.
so the backup option isn't relavant

use them for mirror / backup drives

lol nice way to admit stuff :pimp

they're not exactly arresting people for downloading torrents where i live :1orglaugh

sell them pretty decent HDD, I am still on 80GB and its enough. So 500GB is still good to sell

Donate it, there are kids and schools that still need computer stuff.

RAID is NOT a backup system
 

Please... please.... PLEASE! Never use Raid0 and Backup in the same sentence. I am not trying to be a dick, but RAID0 (striping) can turn multiple drives in one large volume. However, if one drive fails ALL the data is lost. RAID5 is the closest "backup raid" you can get, but at the end of the day raid is about redundancy and not backup.

RAID0 is much better for making a speedy array of disks for high disk usage applications like video encoders that can bottle neck on the write speed of a single hard drive. Pretty much do not store anything on RAID0 you do not have backed up or do not want to risk losing.

Take out the platters. They make cool coasters.