His love of PCs and their components was born out of trying to squeeze every ounce of performance out of the family computer. Tinkering with his own build at age 10 turned into building PCs for friends and family, fostering a passion that would ultimately take shape as a career path.
Besides being the first call for tech support for those close to him, Ty is a computer science student, with his focus being cloud computing and networking. He also competed in semi-pro Counter-Strike for 8 years, making him intimately familiar with everything to do with peripherals.
I have years of Counter-Strike demos, video clips, game backups, save files, and other data that I open maybe twice a year. Until recently, they sat on the same fast storage as everything I use every day, which felt like a waste. Now they live on two old SATA hard drives, a 1TB and a 2TB, that cost me almost nothing when I bought them.
They're not part of my backup scheme that follows the 3-2-1 rule, but they act as cold storage: old, finished files I want to keep but will rarely need to touch. Old hard drives suit that role perfectly, because they're cheap, reliable when unplugged, and relatively easy to read years from now.
Free storage can't be beat
What I already have is cheaper than anything I could buy new or pre-owned
The value argument is stupid simple, and it's the same argument I applied to the start of my home lab. I already owned both drives, so my only cost was a dock. I did pay for these drives up front years ago, and while the cost of 1TB and 2TB drives dipped from that point, they have spiked significantly in recent times, and moving demos, clips, and game backups off my main storage frees up space on drives that cost real money and should hold things I actually use.
Three terabytes is small by today’s standards, but it’s plenty for an archive of finished files. Low capacity and speed disqualifies these drives from pretty much every other job, but it doesn’t matter much here. Putting them to use also keeps two working drives out of the landfill.
Hard drives handle sitting in a drawer much better than SSDs
Very little rot occurs
Credit: 
The underside of a HDD. 
Price alone doesn't make a drive good for archival use, and the bigger reason why I was keen to reuse them for cold storage is how hard drives act when unplugged. A hard drive records data as magnetic orientation on its platters, and it does so in a way that's non-volatile. An SSD stores data as electrical charge trapped in NAND flash cells, and that charge slowly leaks away when the drive is unpowered. Wear on the cells and warmer storage can both speed up the leak, and NAND that packs more bits into each cell like QLC has less margin before a leak changes what a cell reads as.
The JEDEC standard for client SSDs requires a drive at the end of its rated write endurance to retain data for one year powered off at 30 degrees, and that's a worst case minimum. A lightly used SSD in a cool closet should last considerably longer than that, but still. Nobody can guarantee your data will be safe for multi-year stretches that archive drives typically sit for.
HDDs can, of course, fail in cold storage too, but in a much different way. Their weak point is the mechanical features inside the drive, things like lubricant and bearings can age over time and result in a disk that doesn't spin up cleanly. The magnetic data is rarely the first thing to fail. For data that will sit on a shelf, I’d rather deal with mechanical risks I can test for than charge slowly leaking out of cells.
Trusting old drives is a gamble
It's not risk-free by any means
As is the risk with reusing anything that's already lived part of its life in an active system, HDDs do tend to edge closer to failure as they get older. Backblaze’s drive stats, the best public data on hard drive failures, backs this up, and shows failure rates rising as drives age. Redundancy is the next problem. An archive on one old drive is a single copy on a single point of failure, and without checksums, a bad sector can quietly corrupt a clip or a save file, and you might not notice for years. This is why I don't rely on these old drives as my only form of cold storage, and they only live as an easy way to get access to the files I don't often need.
The risk is fine for an archive
Especially if you have a proper 3-2-1 backup scheme
These drives aren't the sole copy of anything, and that's why I'm comfortable absorbing the risk a bit. Everything on my cold storage drives is also covered by my 3-2-1 backups. The cold drives are where I go to browse an old demo or grab a clip without restoring anything. If one dies, I lose some convenience and a drive I got to reuse, not my data.
Before trusting an old drive, run a SMART extended self-test and a full read of its surface. A drive that doesn't check out at that stage probably shouldn't be used for anything, let alone cold storage. After that, just plug in the drives periodically to verify the checksums, and you're in a good spot.