As time passes, I keep buying larger and larger HDDs to fit in my PCs and laptops.
Consequently I am left with a whole bunch of 80gb, 256gb, 512gb, 600gb, 1tb, 2tb HDDs.
I would like to be able to use them as a file server and backup / NAS. Is such a thing possible?
It would not even be my main NAS. It would be like a backup for the backup in my parents' house, in case my current house burns down, or if I move and I HIRE A BUNCH OF CHEAP GITS OFF CRAIGSLIST TO DO THE PACKING, LOGAN! :D
Do I have to do that by hand? Or is there software that can govern a rag tag team of old crappy HDDs?
I'm sure this is achievable, but your reliability is going to be next to null from the start. Hence... might not be worthwhile.
So I should throw away terabites of working hard drives? :(
I'm just trying to put them to good use. It sucks that every time you want to upgrade your NAS you need to buy 6 new hdds....
You need to throw all hdds away if there's no more ports for new hdds in your nas.
You need to throw all hdds away if one drive failed and you want to replace it with a newer kind of drive.
A lot of people could definitely use some sort of clever software "raid".
I originally did something very similar with my cheap NAS. (which is now a remote backup at my parents) I used NAS4Free however I had each disk configured individually and manually made sure data was being mirrored.
There is OS's that can do redundant drive pooling with JBOD configurations. (Most notably the original windows home server) but I have never used them and thus don't know how well or easily they manage when a drive does die.
This article may help http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/36458/9-alternatives-for-windows-home-servers-drive-extender/
1 Like
Not necessarily, just be aware you may have problems.
You could use them for some backup manually and then deep store them for old important peaces of data like old family photos ect by using a external mount then vacuum sealing them.
You could use them in a raid aray, maybe
Servers, swap, importing and exporting photography and video, trying out Linux....... anyrhing you could do with a new one.
I have one use for HDDs that are too small to be useful for data storage - testing new HDD swap bays. Long time ago I got a swap bay (Icy dock?) that was defective and fried two of my drives. Now every time I get a new one, I test each slot with a crappy drive to make sure hot swap works and don't eat drives in the process.
Otherwise I give them away to friends and family.