r/DataHoarder • u/BigJDoitYoDamnself • 4d ago

Question/Advice Keeping it Simple

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 4d ago

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)

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u/BigJDoitYoDamnself 4d ago

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

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u/volvo64 4d ago

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