Those of you who have built multiple PCs might have some old SSDs lying in a drawer, next to your ancient HDDs. While you might turn your nose up at an old SATA or Gen3 NVMe SSD, it still has several uses that you might not have considered. From using it for storage and backup, to media streaming or building a NAS, your old SSD has tons to offer.
If selling, donating, or scrapping it doesn’t appeal to you, check out this list of five easy yet useful ways to ensure your SSD gets a new lease on life.
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5
Begin your Raspberry Pi DIY career
MicroSD out, SSD in
Raspberry Pi is a shockingly good SBC for the price, and allows you to use it in innumerable DIY projects. From creating a Raspberry Pi media server and a NAS-berry Pi, to a Wi-Fi extender and home automation controller, you can practically create anything with the right Raspberry Pi model. What you will need for most of these Raspberry Pi DIY projects is a reliable storage drive, and this is where your old SSD comes in.
Raspberry Pi works with a microSD card just fine, but the benefits of replacing it with a much faster SSD are immense. You can get faster boot times, application load times, and file sharing. Connecting an old SATA or NVMe SSD to a Raspberry Pi will require adapters, but you also have the option to use an external USB SSD. Instead of forgetting about your trusty old SSDs forever, you can use them to learn new skills and create useful networking, gaming, or surveillance devices.
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4
Get your recovery drive in place
You never know when disaster may strike
A recovery drive with a bootable operating system, antivirus program, and data recovery tool is an essential failsafe for preparing to troubleshoot future OS corruptions. You need to create a recovery drive well in advance, instead of regretting it later. Windows system errors and corruptions are common, and if you find yourself without any way to get back into your system or access your files, it can cause a lot of unnecessary panic.
A spare SSD, even a small one, can act as a recovery drive which you can use to get a corrupted system back online either by diagnosing errors, removing malware, or reinstalling your original operating system. Windows allows you to create a recovery drive by simply following the on-screen steps in the Recovery Drive app.
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3
Expand the storage on your console
An old SSD is much better than a new external hard drive
Modern consoles like the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S have NVMe SSDs much faster than the ones you’ll probably have lying around, but they can still utilize the extra storage. Consoles with a 1TB internal drive can run out of space fast, and connecting your external SSD or internal SSD (with an adapter) to your console provides sufficiently fast external storage for your games.
For a SATA SSD, you’ll need to arrange a SATA-to-USB enclosure, and for an NVMe SSD, an M.2 NVMe-to-USB enclosure to connect it to your console. These enclosures will only cost you around $10-$20, but can help you avoid the purchase of a secondary SSD to expand your console storage. The performance compared to the console’s internal storage will be lower, naturally, but it’s still a worthwhile use case.
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2
Build an SSD-only NAS
High time you built one yourself
A DIY NAS is one of the most useful additions you can make to your home setup, centralizing your files, movies, and photos and making them accessible on any device. If you have multiple old SSDs you aren’t using, it might be a great idea to repurpose them into an SSD-only NAS. While there are some concerns about using SSDs in a NAS, using old SSDs makes up for those, since you aren’t spending money on new storage.
You can choose from many operating systems for your NAS, but TrueNAS SCALE and OpenMediaVault are recommended for beginners. You can combine your old SSD with some NAS hard drives for more reliability, as they are specially designed for the sustained use that most NAS systems are under. However, for a DIY home NAS, some used SSDs alone should be fine if you’re simply using the system for media streaming and other light workloads.
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Is a flash-only NAS better than mechanical hard drives?
Simple yet functional
If you don’t want the hassle of creating your own NAS, and simply want to access your movies on your home network, there might be another way. Your router likely has a USB drive to accept any USB drives. If you turn your SATA or NVMe SSD into an external SSD with the appropriate adapter, you can simply connect it to the router and invest a few minutes to enable file sharing in the router settings.
The performance of such a setup will not be the same as what you can get from a NAS, but it’s quicker and simpler for most users. Plus, you only need to spend on the external enclosure instead of the additional hardware that’s needed for a full-fledged NAS. Besides, you can simply use your newly converted external SSD as backup storage or a regular external drive to transfer data between your devices.
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Reuse old SSDs instead of letting them go to waste
Your old SSD might have developed minor faults or might be too slow to be used on your primary computer. However, you can still reuse it in multiple ways to create useful devices instead of throwing it away. If you don’t have the time to invest in any of these projects, you can recycle your old SSD and other PC parts as e-waste so they don’t end up in the trash heap.
#ways #repurpose #SSD
source: https://www.xda-developers.com/ways-to-repurpose-old-ssd/
