Hard Drive Graveyard

The HardDrive Graveyard (HDG)

I’m one of those people that just won’t throw away a hard drive. Not so much because I need the extra 8 GB that my four year old hard drive will give me, but because I just don’t want any of my private data getting out there. It may also be driven by some laziness in organizing all of my old data and the nagging fear that I haven’t gotten everything that I need from the old hard drive. So what to do?

General Concept
Ideally, there would be a ATX sized case with 12 flexible slots for desktop and laptop-sized hard drives. The slots would be flexible on both size and type (supporting SATA all the way back to the really old-school hard drives (think IDE).

The flexibility could be obtained by having a standardized connection at the back of the slot of the HDG. Then, through different trays (think MacPro) and adapters that would snap on the back of the hard drive, the device could handle any previous format. The specific trays and adapters could be sold with the HDG or after the fact for a minimum ($10) amount of money. Speed would not be a key factor of this device – this is not designed to provide primary, shared storage for a home network, but rather to only provide cheat and convenient access to old data.

The HDG would have a FireWire 800, USB 2.0 and Ethernet connection on the back. From there, it should have the same network accessibility as the best home-targeted storage area network boxes that are on the market (think Infrant and others). RAID features probably don’t need to be a big factor, but couldn’t hurt. I think a small number of added features here would help. One would be to allow the user to set a hard drive as active or old. All of the old hard drives would be logically grouped together by the server software and the first level of folders would be the separate hard drives with titles of their volume names. In addition, it would be nice to have an “OS Scrub” feature, that would remove all of the files that are on your hard drive that were there simply to allow you to run your computers (i.e., Windows or OSX system files). You shouldn’t need these files anymore, because you don’t even have the computer anymore. [Note: it would be really cool to rig up a virtualization program to make that last statement untrue. Parallels or Virtual Desktop could add some great features if they could figure out how to recognize a “computer” and just make that hard drive act as the old computer.] The space freed by the removal of system files could be used as additional storage in the context of the old stuff that you were doing, or as part of the next feature. The next additional feature (though not a critical one) is “Large Slow Storage” or LSS. If I am describing something that is already well-described, please forgive me, but it is a novel concept to me. LSS generally would be used for files that would not be accessed with any frequency, and when they were accessed, would not need lightning fast file delivery. Archiving video would be a good example of where this could be useful.

But for this concept to work well, the HDG will have to be a champ with power savings features: to both minimize customer operational costs as well as manage heat. The device should be able to individually turn off hard drives when they are not in use based on customer-set preferences. This would minimize time that the old hard drives are spinning and allow the user to get the quality of service that they need.

Total price for the HDG could not be more than $400 and the lower it can go, the better.

Why won’t this probably work?
• Storage is getting large too quickly. You can almost just copy your old hard drive lock, stock and barrel, onto the new hard drive and still have plenty of room.
• Storage prices continue to fall. Perhaps just a corollary to the first reason, but the fact that you can do the above, doesn’t mean that you necessarily will. The fact that you can do it ridiculously cheaply (at least compared to the last time you saw storage prices), you may very well do it without thinking.
• Better migration software has emerged (either within the OS or in addition to it), to allow users to move all of their files onto the new computer. My view is that OSX does a pretty good job on this, but I’m wary of trusting something like this without double-checking. That’s where your time can really be sucked up – others probably disagree.

Who should do it?
Obvious candidates are DLink, Linksys or Buffalo. Others, closer to start up, like Infrant, could really make a go of it here. Its probably not a huge market, but one that I would assume that they could pursue. Pursuit could also bring some modular benefits for them. The connectors/sleds/slots that are generic for this project, could be adapted and developed only once for the rest of their product line.

[Update 2014-11-28]
There are a great many devices known as Hard Drive Docks available that do something similar to what I described here.  I must have been a thought leader?  No, I'm just joking.