The Second “R”

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle – Growing up, I remember this mantra being drilled into my brain at school, and demonstrated in very real ways at home by my parents. Lately, I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the second “R”, specifically reusing old computer hardware.

Up until fairly recently, I had a big pile of old servers (we’re talking Pentium Pro and early Pentium 2 boxes) that I disposed of, since they were just gathering dust in my friend’s basement (so much for my dreams of building a poor man’s linux cluster to help my friend with his video rendering). Now that all that’s gone, I still have a lot of bits and pieces kicking around my own place, and I’m thinking now’s the time to start gathering it all together and figure out what the heck to do with it all.

My plan at this point is as follows:

Designate the corner of one room as the place where all the outdated tech will sit

Inventory the appropriate specs for each of the pieces of hardware (storage capacity for drives, connection type for flash cards, etc.)

Start plotting my projects

Part of the impetus to do this is that I’m planning on turning my 7-year-old PC into semi-retirement as a file server. I’m hoping that, for example, if I gather up all the small USB drives and flash cards, I could mount different parts of the kernel to them, which would mean that my larger magnetic drives would be solely for file storage. I’ve got a couple other ideas rattling around in my head, but they’re dependant on getting some loaned equipment back, so I won’t go into the details now.

Feel free to post your thoughts/suggestions on projects that could be attempted!