RCBH928 wrote:Had to through couple of old laptops. I felt sorry. It has like 4GB ram, HDD, functioning DVD writer drives, working display, batteries, charge bricks, keyboard and not to mention the Windows license. I feel like somehow this could put into good use. But who wants a 7-10 year second hand old laptop, literally worthless usability wise and fixing anything in it is probably going to cost more than its worth.
Actually, there are people that want a 7-10 year old laptop. They can definitely still be useful, especially if you can't afford something new (such as a college student).
My laptop is actually at least 10 years old now. It's still in great condition, primarily because I don't use it a lot. The battery still holds a charge, though I have no idea how long it lasts since I rarely use it on battery power. It is a first or second gen Core i3, so not the best CPU but more than adequate for internet and office stuff. It came with 4 GB of RAM but I've upgraded it to 8 GB. It came with Windows 7, but I haven't used it since it lost support. I got a Samsung EVO SSD when it was on sale and set it up with Windows 10. I also have an old SSD that I setup with Linux, which can be perfect for old PCs. And definitely perfectly usable for a college student that just needs internet and office stuff.
RCBH928 wrote:Any one has a smart use case for 300 and 500 GB drives? I could use them for backups but they are old so I don't know if its a smart idea to use it as a backup drive. I am starting to have a bank of older but smaller drives.
Here's some I can think of...
You can set it up in a PS2 with FMCB/OPL and boot games from it. There's ways to use a PATA HDD with a Dreamcast. And the MODE, which is an ODE for Dreamcast, Saturn and PS1, can use a HDD for storage.
If it's an old drive with a lot of miles, I can understand not wanting to use it for long term backups and archiving. But you still can, just keep an eye on the SMART values. Or, if you have a desktop, you can set up an old HDD to use as a scratch drive. Photoshop or most video and editing software can be set up to use an alternative drive for temporary and working files. This can give you better performance, and also keeps wear and tear off of your main drives. You can even utilize a scratch drive for software like 7-Zip, were you might not want to write temp files to your SSD all the time.
You can use an old HDD with a Raspberry Pi for any number of things.
You can get an external HDD enclosure for it, which is literally just a case for the HDD that adapts it to USB or whatever so they're usually pretty cheap. Then you can use it as a big flash drive. Or, some routers have a USB port that can be used to share devices like a printer or HDD. If you put your HDD in an enclosure, you could use it with such a router as a share drive.
There's probably plenty of other uses for an old HDD.
