5 ms·

Slightly misleading headline, but after reading the article I have to admit I have been in the same position myself. After years or pilling on HDDs, I now have

by jcrei 12y ago

Slightly misleading headline, but after reading the article I have to admit I have been in the same position myself. After years or pilling on HDDs, I now have a small collection that would be better used as a side storage. Sadly I haven't been able to find any decent solutions (i.e. good price/quality ratio). You either go with expensive NAS solutions, or find feeble HDD enclosures that are prone to failure. Has anyone found something good to house 3-4+ HDDs that can be accessed via USB?

pervycreeper 12y ago
>expensive NAS solutions A cheap case, motherboard, CPU and a little RAM can be had for well under $200. Doesn't strike me as that bad, aside from the effort required to set it up.
jacquesm 12y ago
Synology nas. I have a ds2411 here that I'm pretty happy with. And as for whether or not it is expensive: the data is expensive, the nas is dirt cheap.
rdl 12y ago
I just put a bunch of external 4TB USB drives on a Mac Mini which is also connected to home theater. I was going to go with a Synology or QNAP but 1) drives were expensive when I was buying (no longer true) 2) this is incremental 3) none of the lower end devices support decent full-disk crypto -- you need to go up to an i3-based system, which is kind of pricey. I looked for the same thing (a multi-drive USB enclosure), but a good Pluggable hub and a bunch of discrete drives seems to work better. ZFS seems like the right solution now, so if I move to a place with an equipment closet, I'll probably do that. (current solution is also pretty quiet)
- jcrei 12y ago
  So out of curiosity, what file system format are you using? HFS+?
  - rdl 12y ago
    Yes :( I realize this is suboptimal, but it's easy.
VLM 12y ago
"find feeble HDD enclosures that are prone to failure." How about NAS trays? Not a $2500 NAS, but just the trays/mounts for a stereotypical desktop. I've done that for about 15 years now, insert the drive for freebsd / linux / windows / whatever and when you're done, remove the drive, maybe insert a different one. It solves a lot of double/tripe boot OS problems to only have one OS per drive and as many drives as you want to buy trays for. I've had excellent result with both the old PATA drives/trays and SATA. No serious problems in 15 years. Superficially its "giant tower case only" however you could mount a receptacle in a tiny desktop case with mini-itx and homemade NAS and just insert data drives not OS drives.
j_s 12y ago
This is usually categorized as JBOD ("just a bunch of disks"): http://amzn.com/s/?field-keywords=jbod http://amzn.com/s/?field-keywords=jbod From there it's time to start reading reviews!
logfromblammo 12y ago
My collection would be better used as paperweights. I think the one on the bottom of the stack might be a 4 GB drive. At one point, I actually got rid of everything smaller than that. My solution was to just get a cheap and prone to failure external enclosure, and copy the old drives to the largest one I had at the time. Whatever I might spend on an enclosure for multiple older drives could probably get me one new external drive big enough to hold everything on those drives. This may be why there are few commercial solutions to this particular problem. By the time an internal drive is old enough to be swapped out, it's usually more worthwhile to copy it to a cheap new external drive than to try to reuse it anywhere else.

by jcrei 12y ago

pervycreeper 12y ago

>expensive NAS solutions A cheap case, motherboard, CPU and a little RAM can be had for well under $200. Doesn't strike me as that bad, aside from the effort required to set it up.

jacquesm 12y ago

Synology nas. I have a ds2411 here that I'm pretty happy with. And as for whether or not it is expensive: the data is expensive, the nas is dirt cheap.

rdl 12y ago

I just put a bunch of external 4TB USB drives on a Mac Mini which is also connected to home theater. I was going to go with a Synology or QNAP but 1) drives were expensive when I was buying (no longer true) 2) this is incremental 3) none of the lower end devices support decent full-disk crypto -- you need to go up to an i3-based system, which is kind of pricey. I looked for the same thing (a multi-drive USB enclosure), but a good Pluggable hub and a bunch of discrete drives seems to work better. ZFS seems like the right solution now, so if I move to a place with an equipment closet, I'll probably do that. (current solution is also pretty quiet)

jcrei 12y ago
So out of curiosity, what file system format are you using? HFS+?
- rdl 12y ago
  Yes :( I realize this is suboptimal, but it's easy.

VLM 12y ago

"find feeble HDD enclosures that are prone to failure." How about NAS trays? Not a $2500 NAS, but just the trays/mounts for a stereotypical desktop. I've done that for about 15 years now, insert the drive for freebsd / linux / windows / whatever and when you're done, remove the drive, maybe insert a different one. It solves a lot of double/tripe boot OS problems to only have one OS per drive and as many drives as you want to buy trays for. I've had excellent result with both the old PATA drives/trays and SATA. No serious problems in 15 years. Superficially its "giant tower case only" however you could mount a receptacle in a tiny desktop case with mini-itx and homemade NAS and just insert data drives not OS drives.

j_s 12y ago

This is usually categorized as JBOD ("just a bunch of disks"): http://amzn.com/s/?field-keywords=jbod http://amzn.com/s/?field-keywords=jbod From there it's time to start reading reviews!

logfromblammo 12y ago

My collection would be better used as paperweights. I think the one on the bottom of the stack might be a 4 GB drive. At one point, I actually got rid of everything smaller than that. My solution was to just get a cheap and prone to failure external enclosure, and copy the old drives to the largest one I had at the time. Whatever I might spend on an enclosure for multiple older drives could probably get me one new external drive big enough to hold everything on those drives. This may be why there are few commercial solutions to this particular problem. By the time an internal drive is old enough to be swapped out, it's usually more worthwhile to copy it to a cheap new external drive than to try to reuse it anywhere else.