What Does One Do With Surplus Storage?

Last night, as I was sitting contemplating the imminent return of my Mushkin 120Gb Chronos, I realized that I have a bit of a problem. Storage problem that is, in the form of more drives than I know what to do with kind of a problem. No, I don't mean that I've got a bunch of 20/40 or even 60 and 80Gb drives sitting around with nowhere to go like everybody else has, but an actual useful-sized drive problem! This occurred to me after I spent about 30 minutes taking apart one of those accursed consumer Dell laptops that a client brought me to extract data. She told me that I could just keep the parts after I copied the data to an external drive for her.

So now, in addition to that one which contained a 500Gb Western Digital Blue drive, I already had a similar situation earlier in the month which yielded a Seagate Momentus XT 500Gb Hybrid drive.

Just those two together adds up to 1Tb of 2.5" drives. On top of that, there are a couple of 160Gb Western Digital Caviar 7200rpm PATA desktop type drives (one of which is a server-class) as well.

I've used a couple of "extra" drives in my HTPC machines as scratch/temp storage, but I don't have any other machines planned or needed. On top of which there are the 3 extra SSDs, two of which are going into the children's laptops as upgrades, thus yielding a spare one of those as well. At this point, I'm truly mystified!?!

I do have a Christmas Holiday project for my wife where I've been tasked to take some old cast-off ThinkPads (T4x & A3x) to make a system for her classroom. Maybe I should build a small file server for that application and create a little internal network. I just get a sense though that this isn't something that the IT folks in her district is going to be very happy with though! Now, if I could find one of those Buffalo Linkstation Mini NASs without drives............ hmmmmm......... That still doesn't create a solution for the 120Gb Chronos SSD though.