What to Do with a 500GB and 1TB Hard Drive?

[Sir Topham Hatt]

I have two external drives, one 500GB and one 1TB drive - both WD.

 

The immediate thought is "backup" but I have two 4TB drives that are mirrors of each other for documents (they're barely pushing 1TB).

I have a lot of media, but again, the important bits are backed up on other 4TB drives.

 

Basically, apart from selling for £10 each, if that, I'm not sure what else to do and not sure they'd even sell at all.

The 500GB one is just too small these days for anything meaningful.

 

I guess I could use the 1TB to back up some (older 500MB sized) games and saved games.

Will have to shook it though as it'll be easier to store.

[+InsaneNutter MVC]

Got any older games consoles? you could hook the drives up to an Xbox 360, Xbox One, Wii (modded only) or Wii U and use them for game storage.

500gb is a lot for the 360, Wii and Wii U, 1TB would hold a fair few older games / backwards compatible 360 games for the Xbox One.

 

You could also encrypt them with Bitlocker and leave them at a friend / family members house as an offsite backup of very important documents / photos.

[ThaCrip]

Still, 500GB/1TB is decent as it's not like it's nothing. I would hang onto them. you could even just copy some of your highest importance data to them as it's never a bad thing to have too many copies of ones high importance data as not having a enough is a potential problem.

 

but if those drives don't mean much to you locally, I like InsaneNutter's idea of offsite backup of encrypting it and storing at family members house. but depending on what's on it, you might not even need to encrypt it.

 

I got a fair amount of hard drives (3.5" and 2.5") smaller than 1TB that I use for external storage in a USB3.0 docking station as I just slide the hard drive in and out and flip the power switch on my power center to power up the docking station and do my transfers. I would say the biggest problem with smaller hard drives is it's just too much shuffling of drives and remembering what is on which. but once I got a 6TB HDD not long ago I swapped it with my 2TB and just got a 2TB for external storage which made things easier/centralized for storing certain data on it as it makes that much easier for me since I can keep all of a certain kind of data on there and it should last me a while before it's full.

 

p.s. I got a moded Wii (they are easy to do as you just need a typical SD card to get the basic mod setup), which largely collects dust for me personally, but I am only using a small device to connect 2.5"(laptop) sized hard drive on it at 250GB which is plenty for a Wii. but on XBox360 I never knew you could put in a custom hard drive even though I did basic moding (so one can burn games to DVD+R DL) which allows one to copy game data from a disc to hard drive, but still requires the disc be in the drive while playing. but the original XBox was the peak of console moding if you ask me as with XBMC that really made it stand out in the old days with playing XviD (.avi) etc. the Wii is also solid for moding, just not as good as a original XBox overall. but after XBox360 generation I never bothered with consoles after that point. but a large portion of what I replay is on PC anyways.

[Sir Topham Hatt]

Have a Wii but not sure if we need / want any more games.

I played it once in the last 12 months, but will start playing Wii Sports a bit more to help me get a bit fitter perhaps.

Although may look into the modding (as a side note, any particular websites to read more about this?).

 

Good thoughts about the off-site backup though 👍

[Sir Topham Hatt]

Just as a quick update:

 

Shucked them both.
Apparently I didn't need to remove the 3.3v pin but Windows said they'd malfunctioned when I put them in my holster (I can't think what the real name is, not a case, but sort of like a hot swappable drive bay connected through USB).

Connected them direct to the PC and after waiting for a few hours (because my PC throws a wobbily and doesn't post if I shut down), booted up and Windows was fine with them.  Went to Disk Manager and formatted them both as Simple Volumes for good measure.

 

Connected them back through the holster thing and now both are recognised and working fine as far as I can see.

 

As I have game backups that are less than 100GB, I've stuck them on the 500GB drive and the 1TB will be spare for now.

Still might look into the Wii thing though.

[Brandon H Supervisor]

I second the Wii/Wii U jailbreaking. This is where these consoles shine. They're the best at GameCube compatibility thanks to Nintendont using Nintindo's own emulation APIs and are great at emulating older consoles too. The homebrew community is also still quite active on them with various items and games.