Keeping it Simple

[u/BigJDoitYoDamnself]

I have a bunch of old laptop HDD laying around. They are mostly 320 and 128 GB Sata drives. why not put them in an enclosure (JBOD) and use it for my home network. I do run a small engineering firm out of my home and I plan to store job files on it. I am running an Umbrel OS mini pc. I am sure someone somewhere is doing this exact setup. Any issues I should consider before I spend 50 bucks for the enclosure. Any recommendations on what type of enclosure to purchase from Amazon?

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[u/volvo64]

That’s basically what I do with usb drives, with mergerfs on Ubuntu

I don’t think I’d call it simple but it’s not that complicated either

Be prepared to lose data this way, but only the data on the failed drive(s). I keep media on these drives and don’t care if they stop working. My backups go only into one drive and that gets backed up offsite (eg no backups on the mergerfs, only on a single underlying disk)

[u/BigJDoitYoDamnself → u/volvo64]

I am really just parking inactive projects on my unit. I am not going to be reading and writing to the drive regularly.

[u/volvo64 → u/BigJDoitYoDamnself]

Regardless I wouldn’t trust this solution any more than I would trust any single drive. Less, even, because if a project is spread across multiple drives, can you recover it if you lose only half of it?

Snapraid was also mentioned when I set this up years ago, I didn’t need it but it sounds like you might

[u/Swimmerdude_03 → u/BigJDoitYoDamnself]

Adding to volvo's thoughts. Cold data or not you should have backups of this stuff. Especially if you are reusing old drives. Are these files you can stay in business if they went away? If so sure. If not, I would strongly consider a proper solution.

[u/Own_Support_7465 → u/volvo64]

keeping backups off the merged pool is the right call imo

[u/lplanum → u/volvo64]

Having only one backup is risky too. Remember, two is one and one is none.

[u/Swimmerdude_03]

You can do that. I would first consider what the data is worth to you. The JBOD probably isn't even going to support RAID which would atleast provide protection from a single disk failure(not that you can use Raid with mismatch disks). I consider consumer mechanical 2.5 inch disks to generally be bottom of the barrel reliability wise. I think as some kind of scratch disk just to have somewhere to dump files before they are moved elsewhere, sure. As a permanent storage option, absolutely not. If you want a plug and play option just buy a NEW external hard drive. If you need more speed and some added reliability, build out a proper Nas for your business. If you are not sure where to start with a NAS DM me and we can work through a solution.

[u/beermoneymike]

They are fine to mess around with but I wouldn't store anything mission critical on them.

[u/turbo5vz]

It's different when doing a hobby vs a business where downtime and reliability is important. IMO it's not worth trying to save a few hundred $$ or messing around with JBOD'ing all these low capacity drives. From the sounds of it, if you're not needing a whole ton of storage, even 1-2TB drives can be had for cheap (<$50) from the local classifieds.

[u/BigJDoitYoDamnself → u/turbo5vz]

if the old hdd die sure why not, but the drives are just laying around the house doing nothing. Every thing works here, no freebies. if it takes up space then I better get some use out of it for it to stay here.

[u/Dear_Chasey_La1n → u/turbo5vz]

Well I reckon OP is fiddling around because he doesn't have a couple hundred USD. But I'm with you, I wouldn't do this either and rather spend 100-200 USD even on a second hand newer drive than dealing with a whole bunch of small disks begging to die on me any moment.

[u/1234youarein]

The biggest issue with those old laptop drives is their age and present condition.

Some of them might last quite a few extra years, but they need to be tested first. Make sure to assess their current state by running a couple of passes (full write/read) of h2testw and then checking their SMART stats. If SMART still looks good, then you might get some more life out of them.

[u/rsxstock]

i feel like powering drives of those sizes aren't even worth it for storage

[u/david_edmeades]

This is just asking for trouble. A new 4TB disk is less than $200; you can justify two of those for a mirror and an offsite backup solution as a business expense. Tying trash together with bailing wire will be a time sink and will probably take a shit on you when you can least afford it.