I'm willing to bet that anyone who has been a PC user for over 10 years has one or more hard drives gathering dust somewhere in their home. What was once the only storage medium for desktops and laptops has now been superseded in almost all areas by the best SSDs. You might not reminisce about the terribly slow speeds or weird sounds of your old hard drives, but their years of loyal service are worth remembering.
In that vein, you have numerous ways to repurpose your old hard drives instead of leaving them abandoned in some closet or relegating them to the scrapyard. Whether your old drive is still functional or not, you can give it a new purpose and extend its life by a few more years, or maybe even indefinitely.
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5 Expand storage on your main PC or console
You can never have enough storage
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One of the easiest ways to keep your trusty ol' hard drive in commission is to dust it off and use it as secondary storage on your primary PC, or even your console. Considering the size of modern games, photos, videos, movies, creative assets, and more, having additional storage never hurts. And if you can install your old hard drive to get 1TB or 2TB of free storage instead of buying a new drive, it's a win for you as well as the environment.
Similarly, your console can always do with an additional drive as external storage, especially if its internal storage is not large enough. Of course, on both your desktop and console, the old hard drive might be much slower compared to the existing storage, but you can still make use of the extra GBs, especially on your desktop for storing lesser-used files, games, media, and more.
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4 Use it as archival storage
HDDs for the win
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One thing that still works in favor of hard drives is the more affordable cost per GB compared to SSDs, especially when you consider larger-capacity drives. If you are a creative professional working with massive 4K assets or just someone who doesn't want to pay for tons of cloud storage anymore, your old hard drive can become a repository for all your files that you want to keep safe for a long time.
In contrast to SSDs which can suffer from data loss if kept powered off for longer periods, hard drives can serve as reliable archival storage. Provided you are not using drives that have already developed hardware faults, they can prove highly cost-effective when you find yourself running out of storage frequently. Users who need to keep dozens of drives as cold storage (unplugged, to be used later) will find HDDs a far better option than SSDs, both from a financial and reliability standpoint.
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3 Create a DIY external drive
Portability plus cheap storage
If you want your old hard drive to function as a more versatile device, you can fashion an external drive out of it. Depending on the form factor -- 2.5" or 3.5" -- you might not even need a power adapter for your DIY external drive. A simple hard drive enclosure bought from Amazon can transform your old internal HDD into a portable external drive that can serve many other purposes in addition to secondary storage.
Before you decide to repurpose your old hard drive into a makeshift external drive, check it for hardware faults and find the right enclosure for it. All that remains is to insert it into the enclosure, format it into your desired format (NTFS or APFS), and offload some of the data from your main PC that you only need occasionally. Note that 2.5-inch hard drives can usually draw all their power from the PC's USB port, but your 3.5-inch drive might need an additional power adapter connected to the enclosure.
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2 Build your own NAS or media server
It's never too late to build one
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If you have been dreaming of finally building your own NAS, a functioning hard drive is just the thing to get you started. You don't even need to buy an off-the-shelf NAS box or use your old PC if you don't want to. Just get yourself a cheap Raspberry Pi, connect your old hard drive, install Raspberry Pi OS Lite (or your OS of choice), and get your NAS online. You'll need more than one drive for a NAS, so try to find all the old drives you can.
You might just want to stream your local media collection to your TV. A DIY media server is all you need to get that done, and a single old hard drive, if working well, is the most important component for building one. Of course, you will still need either a spare PC or an SBC to actually create a media server, but the latter is hardly an expensive affair.
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1 Salvage dead hard drives for useful internals
Bring your own scrapyard
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Your dead hard drives won't be suitable for any of the projects above, but they can still be useful for their internals. Hard drives have various smaller components inside them that can be extremely handy for more than a few crafty initiatives. The circular platter, neodymium magnets, motor, and PCB of your old hard drive can serve as the foundation for some cool upcycling projects.
Removing the screws from the top housing of your old hard drive will expose the platter and magnets inside it, which are the two things featured in most DIY projects. You can extract the platter from the drive and use it as a rearview mirror or just a plain old mirror. If you have multiple old drives, you can even create a hard drive platter wind chime by hanging the platters with strings tied to a ring mounted to the roof.
The neodymium magnets inside your dead drive are shockingly strong, and if you have enough of them, you can fashion a nifty knife block to hang on your kitchen wall. The magnets can easily handle the weight of your kitchen knives, successfully keeping them aloft without any hooks or other items. You can also create a personal mini-safe with your old drive by removing all the top screws but one, leaving the last one to serve as a hinge, then store cash or personal effects inside it. No one will suspect that an unremarkable old hard drive contains any valuables.
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You can always reuse or recycle old PC parts
It's often hard to keep old hardware in use once you upgrade to a newer machine or the old components stop working. However, with some creativity and time, you can repurpose old PC parts, especially hard drives, into useful devices and tools. Besides using them for their intended purpose, you can also salvage internal components from dead drives and create geeky DIY contraptions.