Chris is looking for things to do with 20 old hard drives “I have twenty 3.5 inch hard drives collecting dust in my garage (10Gb and all working) and I will use them to do things. What things I haven’t decided yet, but I already have a couple of ideas. We have 20 nice shiny discs, as many read/write heads complete with arm, 40 very powerful magnets, and so on. It’s actually only the imagination that sets the limits. In this first part we go through the, maybe trivial but vital, task of taking the drive apart in its components without damaging anything.” Link.
18 thoughts on “Things you can do with 20 hard drives”
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The magnets are the most useful part. I used the magnets from (15) 4GB Seagate SCSI drives to hold the window screens on my school bus camper conversion..
I have also though about using the magnets to build a high torque hub motor for bicycle power assist, the head positioning coils might be useful for this but I suspect heavier gauge wire would be needed.
Hmm . . . the disks could be arrayed in a parabola and used to to collect solar energy – there was a floppy drive to heliostat project over at Hackaday.com on 11/29 that could make your mirror track the sun. Boil water with the heat and drive a generator made with the magnets and the head coils, hmmm . . .
Jake.
I would say the most useful thing you could make with 20 usable 10 gb drives would be…20 usable computers. If any of you guys are like me, you routinely come across that garage sale find that all it needs to be up and running for grandma/donation is a working hard drive, and 10gb is more than enough for a base installation for web browsing / paper writing / email, etc.
Better to create than destroy.
I would say the most useful thing you could make with 20 usable 10 gb drives would be…20 usable computers. If any of you guys are like me, you routinely come across that garage sale find that all it needs to be up and running for grandma/donation is a working hard drive, and 10gb is more than enough for a base installation for web browsing / paper writing / email, etc.
Better to create than destroy.
Sorry about the repeat, site bugged out. It might be a good idea to put a (please hit this button only once) descriptor on the buttons.
make a whole surround sound array of HD speakers. thats what I would do…
I’m with n3ldan: Can you say Hard Drive-Orchestra?
Platter roller-skates?
Motorized ones, maybe?
DIY raid array?
how do you make speakers from hard drives?