I recently acquired 7 120GB ssd’s for free from computers my employer’s were donating.
I thought it might be cool and functional to put them in raid to make one large drive w/ redundancy. Though i’m trying to think of the best way to use them.
First off, I figured i’d buy one extra 120 GB to even it out to 8 since they’re pretty cheap.
I considered getting 2x 4 bay external 2.5" enclosures but best I could find was something with a usb 3.0 adapter with 5Gbs ouput. I feel like this would be kind of a loss in the speed advantages of ssd.
As an alternative I could fit 3 pcie adapters that could each fit 2x 2.5" drives that i’m not using but each slot is limited to 6 Gbs a second which isn’t as bad but still not optimal for the raid. But is probably the best solution so far.
I could have the spare 2 plugged directly into sata.
If I were to remove both 1tb spinning rust I could fit 5 in sata and have the last 3 in individual pcie slots. But I would be significantly reducing how much storage I have which is less than ideal.
Is there a such thing as a 2 bay 2.5" pcie nvme adapter? I’m not super familiar computer architecture so I’m not even sure if interfacing with nvme would give the desired result of fully obtaining the throughput of both ssd’s.
An alternative might be an external enclosure to lightning or 3.1 (SS USB A?) I have 1 lighting port and a couple 3.1 USB slots.
This whole thing may just be a waste of time and I may be better off fitting as many as I reasonably can via the remaining sata ports and calling it a day.
If you could get a used sas hba/raid card that works with your system for $20/$25 off ebay and a sata breakout cable $5-£10 and play with a raid/scratch drive?
I don’t think I’d buy an extra ssd, rather use 6 in raid6 / raidz2, and have a spare.
USB cables might cost about $5 each (USB2?) and 6 of them would be $30 already.
I actually do have a sas raid card that i’m not using currently though I think it only interfaces with 2 drives, I have the cables for them some where. I might be able to get another from a server we’re throwing out. Thanks for the suggestion. Even if I could only use 2, using them as a scratch drive sounds like a decent idea.
What are the usb cables for in your suggestion? Wouldn’t the sas card connect directly to the drives via sata? I already have a plethora of sata cables laying around I could use.
I’ve got a couple of old 120gig ssd’s in a scratch drive, the random is okay, but to be honest, not amazing.
One nvme does better, but I had a bunch of them kicking around a drawer.
was gonna switch them out for a bunch of used 2tb rust, in a 6 wide mirror
got it, interesting. I am planning on getting some nvme at some point. My MB supports gen 4 so I figured i’d buy some fancy m.2’s when I felt like I needed the storage.
I don’t plan on using an nvme for scratch but if I feel like the scratch ssd’s aren’t doing much I could just try and raid them for proper storage (i’m not super familiar w/ scratch but it sounds like swap with striping?). Better than nothing w/ free drives I suppose. I’ll have to see what that card looked like on that other server. I want to say it hard more ports on it but I can’t remember.
For sure, if you already have the drives and hardware, then it’s fun to play about.
If you has spare sata ports on the motherboard, Windows storage spaces si pretty easy on win10, but I wouldn;t use it on new drives, as in my experience it falls out of sync and would cause exsessive write cycles. Or you could go striped/mirrored/ raid5 to see how it goes.
So I would say for sure play about, but any money sunk into it wouldn’t pay back (but it’s your fun to decide where to spend your cash)
Yeah, you’re not gonna end up with something super useful anyway. Maybe think about that NAS that needs a OS drive, mom’s old laptop, lil’ timmy’s first PC… stuff like that. Old systems more often than not can be revived by switching from spinning rust to an SSD. And for those cases old 120GBs are exactly what you want.
If you have a 5.25" drive you could get an icydock:
This combined with an 8 sataport raid card would allow you to do a RAID1+0 480 GB setup, or a RAID6 720 GB.
Like others have mentioned, this will be little more than a toy setup, and any money sunk will not be recovered - but you will learn a lot about RAID so not necessarily a bad thing.
