A big junkyard is any electronics enthusiast's (in fact any engineer's) dream come true. As the popular show Junkyard Wars from the Discovery Channel so spectacularly demonstrated, an enthusiast will be able to fashion almost anything humanly imaginable from a big enough junkyard and a complete set of tools.
Last week I set out to do something quite like it, but nowhere near as impressive and tough. In fact, the ease of the process surprised me so much that I thought I'd blog about it so other people might have an opportunity to do these things too.
Well, it all started with my discovery of a dumping space where I live (thanks to my room mate) where generations of seniors left the things they didn't want to take with them. Since this area was relatively unknown, I was able to carry out my work in peace and solitude. I was amazed by the things I found, which ranged from entire laptops and desktops to thumb drives, sound systems, and the primary focus of this article, external hard disks. All of them not in working order of course, but where's the fun if they were all brand-new?
Any external hard disk has two parts: the actual hard disk, and the converter that converts whatever protocol the disk uses into USB. A protocol can be visualised as a language, and a converter as a translator. Now, my job became simpler because hard drives of our time mostly use two protocols: SATA and IDE. Now I don't need to go into the details, but the essential idea was based on the fact that if you open up an external hard disk, which by the way is very easy to do, you could find and separate these two parts. Once I had done that to all the hard disks I found (which was a considerable amount) I was left with these:
Last week I set out to do something quite like it, but nowhere near as impressive and tough. In fact, the ease of the process surprised me so much that I thought I'd blog about it so other people might have an opportunity to do these things too.
Well, it all started with my discovery of a dumping space where I live (thanks to my room mate) where generations of seniors left the things they didn't want to take with them. Since this area was relatively unknown, I was able to carry out my work in peace and solitude. I was amazed by the things I found, which ranged from entire laptops and desktops to thumb drives, sound systems, and the primary focus of this article, external hard disks. All of them not in working order of course, but where's the fun if they were all brand-new?
Any external hard disk has two parts: the actual hard disk, and the converter that converts whatever protocol the disk uses into USB. A protocol can be visualised as a language, and a converter as a translator. Now, my job became simpler because hard drives of our time mostly use two protocols: SATA and IDE. Now I don't need to go into the details, but the essential idea was based on the fact that if you open up an external hard disk, which by the way is very easy to do, you could find and separate these two parts. Once I had done that to all the hard disks I found (which was a considerable amount) I was left with these:
Now all that was left was to mix and match the different converters to hard-disks, identify defective units and what you're left with will be a bunch of perfectly good hard drives, and if you'd kept the casings and you can scavenge a little padding foam from somewhere you can make them shock-proof as well.
Or, as the title says, you can add them up of put them in a RAID array, and voila! You have a 1 or 2 TB hard-drive at the cost of a little elbow grease.
