What do y'all do with your old hard drives?

Keep it in the PC as a secondary drive, you can move some gsmes to it which don't really benefit from the SSD, or just move them so you don't have to download them again.

It's also great for media storage, playing movies from SSD won't be any faster, and if you keep your PC powered on, you can setup a plex server or a network share, and access the movies from the TV for example. You can also make backups of your data from the SSD to the HDD, it's not as good as a backup in a separate computer, but it can still protect your data in case your boot drive goes corrupt (because of Windows updates), or simply if you delete a file by accident.

Leave them stashed away until I get a random request for a file many years later, by which time they are inaccessible

If it works, put it in my media server PC,

if it doesn't work, this

Keep them in a box in my closet and tell myself I'll use them for a storage/media server 🥲

If its big enough to still be of viable use(500gb+), I'd keep it in my PC and turn it into a data drive.

If its to small to bother continuing to use (<240gb), I'd just harvest the magnets out of it and destroy the disks.

I just use them as an extra drive so I can have more things on my system without having to delete things

I just keep setting them up as external hard drives. I keep non demanding steam games on them.

I have all those HDDs and even some SDDs somewhere in a drawer thinking to use them somewhere in the future, while knowing full well that I'll end up buying a new drive whenever I need one... 😅

If they haven't failed, who couldn't use extra storage? See how many you can fit in a case and make a rig for your backups why not

If it's a piece of junk, you can always rip it apart and pull out the magnets and use the rest for target practice.

If it's a nice drive keep it in your computer for Media Storage / Game Storage.

Buy a small board computer (RPi or something similar) and turn it into a NAS on your local network.

Use it as a backup drive for your main drive/documents.

Use veracrypt and then use it for my personal documents. Keep in a safe place incase something major happens to my house.

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

Buy or make a nas/server. Good for backups, media, pihole, etc.

I moved it to my new PC with the plan of copying everything over to the new, bigger HDD as a backup for all the stuff that has followed my upgrade chain since 1995.

Then I put that off a couple months, and the old hard drive died.

It's been a few years since that happened and I'm still so incredibly upset about that.

Scrub them then reformat and fill them with definitely not pirated stuff and definitely not scraped reddit stuff.

I grandfather then through a number of systems. When it no longer makes sense: Secure wipe and donate, or drill through and dispose of.

I used to keep them forever, but ever since I got myself a NAS, i try not to let them accumulate.

For work, the larger drives (4TB+) get used for archive storage alongside NVMe primaries. Everything else, at least those below 1TB used to get secure wiped then drilled but it got old fast as now we've got boxes and boxes of them going rusty in storage

Haven't really used spinning disks for anything but my home NAS since 2010 or so. Which means all my old drives come out of the NAS... And either get cycled into my backup NAS or put into a multi-disk jbod enclosure that I use as "scratch" space for random data projects I'm doing on the side.

Ones that cycle out of scratch space are wiped and, if I'm being honest, sitting in a stack in my storage room. I really should stop procrastinating a trip to the recyclers...

Depends on the HDD. If they have bad SMART results or are too small, they get disassembled for the magnets. HDDs that still have some life in them are used for cold storage backups.

If they aren't reliable anymore, you can pull the magnets.

Does anyone else find that things like this go faster if sold for a low, low price versus given away free?

hoard them. I have a stack of like 10 hard drives and 4 laptop hard drives. If I need one I move all the files off of it onto another.

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.