can anyone think of a good use for an old velociraptor?

[Chaoticlusts]

Hey all

In a few months time (once sandy bridge is available pretty much) I'm going to be doing a complete system upgrade..part of this will be moving to some form of SSD (single raid 0 or PCI-E will depend on the market then) as my primary boot disk etc....I currently am using a velociraptor 300GB as my boot drive (and steam drive)...from what i've seen of benchmarks though some new 7200rpm high capacity drives are actually comparable to velociraptors (at least gen1 ones maybe not the brand new series)...basically i'm wondering what the hell to do with my reasonably expensive but now seemingly useless drive...should I just consign it to an old system or leave it lying around as a worthless drive or is there some redeemable use for it I'm completely missing?

one last resort I guess could be tearing the heatsink off it and using it as an xbox360 drive (you can buy 3rd party housings and surprisingly velociraptors are on the very short list of drives that actually work for this ) but yeah that seems a little pointless too

 

[taltamir]

winXP / win98 boot drive for legacy games.

my gaming machine has win7 x64 on my 80GB intel SSD, old 74GB raptor with winXP, WD 640GB 2 platter drive for general local storage, and bulk storage on RAIDZ2 on NAS.

to boot into windows XP I just reboot and hit f12 during post to manually select device to boot from.
it is important that only one drive if plugged in when you install windows it will likely mess up the placement of NTldr

one last resort I guess could be tearing the heatsink off it and using it as an xbox360 drive (you can buy 3rd party housings and surprisingly velociraptors are on the very short list of drives that actually work for this ) but yeah that seems a little pointless too

MS bans consoles that use a drive not sold by MS, they have a variety of methods to check... so I wouldn't recommend it

 

[Mr. Pedantic]

Take it apart and marvel at how it works.

 

[taltamir]

Take it apart and marvel at how it works.

that is wasteful.. you can buy broken drives on ebay (for parts) online for practically nothing (pretty much just pay shipping) if you want to take one apart. And sell your working drive.

 

[Emulex]

take off the heatshield and throw it into a 2.5" SAS/SATA sled for server

 

[Blain]

If it still has warranty left... sell it.

 

[hclarkjr]

Hey all

In a few months time (once sandy bridge is available pretty much) I'm going to be doing a complete system upgrade..part of this will be moving to some form of SSD (single raid 0 or PCI-E will depend on the market then) as my primary boot disk etc....I currently am using a velociraptor 300GB as my boot drive (and steam drive)...from what i've seen of benchmarks though some new 7200rpm high capacity drives are actually comparable to velociraptors (at least gen1 ones maybe not the brand new series)...basically i'm wondering what the hell to do with my reasonably expensive but now seemingly useless drive...should I just consign it to an old system or leave it lying around as a worthless drive or is there some redeemable use for it I'm completely missing?

one last resort I guess could be tearing the heatsink off it and using it as an xbox360 drive (you can buy 3rd party housings and surprisingly velociraptors are on the very short list of drives that actually work for this ) but yeah that seems a little pointless too

i switched from a 150 velociraptor to a intel g2 80gb and just left it in the case but not hooked up. i am keeping for backup in case the SSD fails.

 

[Chaoticlusts]

Thanx for all the responses ^_^

some additional things I should have noted...I already have a NAS and a large amount of sata drives in my computer so (once i've rebuilt the nas there will be 15 drives between the two though i'll likely ditch the two IDE ones cause well...they're useless and ancient ) so the only use it could have is because of it's apparent 'speed'...I'd consider using it as a boot drive for my NAS but with the additional drives i'll be adding i'll be out of sata ports...could add another sata controller too it I guess and just put the raptor on the extra controller...

as for the 360 yes they ban HD's that aren't official the fun workaround is there's a small amount of WD drives that the 360 recognizes as official (since WD is the brand of HD in the official drives) the raptor's being one of them I have a friend who is constantly online with his 360 and has put a 2.5" 7200rpm WD drive in there (the drives normally in 360's are 5200rpm) about 8 months ago with no hassles (granted that doesn't mean it'll never get banned)

so backup isn't really viable since I have tons of drive that will account for that unless the transfer speed to the raptor would make a decent difference for the backup

Just checked up the warrenty apparently they have 5 year warrenties so rather than it being almost at the end of it's coverage it's more like halfway through..so selling it might be the best option....problem is I'd feel like I was ripping someone off if I sold it for any decent amount since my research seems to indicate your better off getting a good high capacity drive....still someone might have a use for it

I guess the question in the first place wasn't what can I do with an extra drive it was more..is there anything I can do with the raptor that would keep it being useful over say just throwing a random 750GB 7200rpm sata drive at whatever it is (I'm flooded with those)