One of the best aspects of PC building is that you can always reuse components from your old systems. PSUs, especially high-quality ones, can last a long time with the right care, and the same holds true for PC cabinets. Meanwhile, CPUs, graphics cards, and RAM can be repurposed in home server rigs once you arm your PC with their newer variants.

However, storage devices are often left out of this discussion, and for good reason. Since SSDs and HDDs tend to degrade with usage, putting drives that have already been through the ringer in a new PC isn’t a good idea. If you’re not careful, you might end up with irrecoverable data loss by reusing old drives – even more so in the case of SSDs due to their limited write cycles.

That said, even leftover SSDs have their use cases, and so long as you don’t rely on them for storing essential data, they can serve you well, especially if you’re into home labs as much as I am.

Blazing-fast external drive for my MacBook

The base M4 model can’t house all my files

I grabbed my MacBook Air M4 at a discounted price earlier this year, and it has served me well. But if I had to name one issue with the device, it’d be that the base model’s 256GB SSD can fill up rather quickly when you use it as a daily driver. Since I love experimenting with hypervisors and container runtime environments, more than half of my MacBook is filled with images and vdisks already. And since it’s an Apple product, I can’t just open up the laptop and swap the built-in SSD with a higher capacity model either.

That’s where an old SSD comes in handy, and not an external one, mind you. I use a PCIe Gen 3 NVMe drive with an enclosure, and it works really well as a high-speed drive. Even with a dedicated dock hooked up to a USB4 port, I’ve got the second one free for the NVMe drive, and the blazing-fast interface lets me use the makeshift portable SSD at blazing-fast speeds.

Page file storage for my Windows 11 PC

I used to do this a lot back in the day

Truth be told, using spare drives to store pagefile.sys is something I used to do in the late 2010s, when I had an abundance of low-capacity SSDs salvaged from laptops but couldn’t afford extra memory due to their steep prices. For the uninitiated, a page file is a means to extend the physical RAM of a system. Enabling this facility lets Windows use a typical storage drive to dump infrequently-accessed data, thereby freeing up the actual RAM for current processes.

Back in the day, I used to chase max FPS like a madman, and the 8GB memory would end up bottlenecking certain high-end games (I’m looking at you, Final Fantasy XV). But since I couldn’t afford more RAM, I’d use a leftover 128GB SSD to house the page file. These days, I’ve got 32GB RAM and huge boot drives, so I don’t have to worry about the page file clogging my primary SSD. But if you’re on an old system – or even reusing a dinosaur machine to run Linux – relegating a spare SSD as the page/swap file storage media can make your PC feel smoother.

Storage drive for bloated games

SSDs work well even with iSCSI shares

Between uncompressed, high-resolution models and wonky optimizations, video game sizes have gone rather bonkers these last couple of years. If I try to install the massive open-world games on my boot drive, I’d end up choking it before I could finish downloading the third title. Even with a 2TB SSD as my Steam drive, there are only so many games I can store in it before being forced to remove the old ones.

Old SSDs can help out with this dilemma quite a bit. So long as the save data remains unharmed, losing the game files to a failing drive wouldn’t really affect me, especially if I reuse leftover SSDs to house old, less-frequently played titles. Heck, I recently did an experiment where I stored open-world games on an NVMe drive hooked up to an iSCSI share. Not only was there zero latency in-game, the load times were pretty quick as well – to the point where it was hard to tell the difference on a 10GbE connection.

Boot drives for my servers

I also use it to store my experimental virtual machines

Although I avoid using SSDs to store archival data, they’re fair game for my server experiments. If I want to tinker with a new virtualization platform, my spare SSDs double as amazing boot drives. Combine them with Log2ram and dedicated HDD-based backups, and you can see why my 3-year-old laptop SSDs have yet to kick the bucket even after powering my secondary home servers.

I even use SSDs that are on their last legs to store highly-experimental virtual guests, including my Whonix, NixOS, and Arch Linux VMs. Since their data is regularly saved on my Proxmox Backup Server, I can use the SSDs to make my virtual guests more responsive without worrying about losing essential project files.

I’d never use them for backups though

Now that I’ve gone over some use cases for old SSDs, I have to mention that I wouldn’t recommend reviving them as backup drives. Between their limited write cycles and their tendency to lose data when left unplugged for too long, normal SSDs aren’t worth using for archival data, let alone old drives that have seen their fair share of usage.