How to salvage old hard drives

[eddieb5]

Hi, I have a semi-old XP box, that I no use for as such and would like to take the two matched 250 Gb hard drives out to use as external hard drives. They are currently part of a striped set. Can I just remove them and pop them into a USB docking station and reformat them there?

[lordsmurf]

Yes.

[lacywest]

Yes ... go for it ... take all those X rated movies and stash them on them thar drives and make room for some more X rated movies ...

[eddieb5]

Yes ... go for it ... take all those X rated movies and stash them on them thar drives and make room for some more X rated movies ...

Thanks! How did you know?

[hech54]

What is a "striped set" of hard drives?

[AlanHK]

What is a "striped set" of hard drives?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

[Cornucopia]

If you wanted to keep them as RAID0 (and you had set up the RAID0 in software, within XP's Disc Mgmt utility), you might not even have to reformat them.
Of course, if you don't care about the current data on them, it doesn't hurt to "refresh" them with a new formatting either.

I've got a set of RAID0, a set of RAID1, and a set of RAID10, all SATA, that I can use in eSATA enclosures which makes for very fast and/or very secure access to important portable media.

Scott

[eddieb5]

Thanks, that sound like a great idea, but I don't understand how you can use RAID sets in enclosures. Don't all the discs within the RAID have to be mounted at once and physically connected to each other?

[hech54]

Thanks, that sound like a great idea, but I don't understand how you can use RAID sets in enclosures. Don't all the discs within the RAID have to be mounted at once and physically connected to each other?

So these hard drives were not part of a RAID setup?

[eddieb5]

Yes, they were, but that was inside the old XP box that I want to get rid of while keeping these drives for external storage by using them in a USB docking station, if I can.