2.5 inch drive array

Marakith

Marakith

Marakith

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Hello!

I recently built a jellyfin server on an old Dell Optiplex running Ubuntu. I need some media storage, and my eyes are watering at the price of external drives!

I've got 10 x 2.5 inch 1tb drives in a pile in the corner of my room. Rather than throw them out I thought I could reuse them!

So I thought about getting a powered USB hub and running the drives in an array as one drive in Linux and spanning my files across it. Has anyone tried this? Are there issues with heat build up or loss of data integrity? How do you physically stack the drives and control vibrations without buying an expensive enclosure.

Thanks!
 
Chinese sites have 4 bay 2.5 to 3.5 adaptor brackets. You could use 3 of them.
More importantly, how are you going to connect all the drives? HBA card?
 
Avathar77 said:
Chinese sites have 4 bay 2.5 to 3.5 adaptor brackets. You could use 3 of them.
More importantly, how are you going to connect all the drives? HBA card?
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I don't think the little Optiplex can fit one - was just planning to use the USB port via a powered USB hub. Is that not a workable approach?
 
How old Optiplex? a bit clunky but you can potentially break out the additional NVME M.2 slot on some to a PCI-e x4 connector and use a drive interface that way (though that gets a bit tricky if it is a A, B or E key one designed for WiFi, etc. rather than NVME).
 
What sort of drives are they? Assuming they are standard laptop hard drives rather than Near Line Enterprise drives?

If so it would be a hard pass from me (especially in a traditional raid or zfs), while it will work, laptop drive firmware is optimised completely differently (maximising time spun down and power saving over performance and reliability).
 
You know when you see someone suggest something so horrific that you actually want them to keep ignoring any and all logic just so you can watch it burn? This is that. It's not just a bad idea, it's the kind of thing that should result in your hard drives being taken into care and you being put on some sort of register.

The obvious solution is to buy a single drive used 10-12TB for the £100-125 it will cost for something not awful (read HGST/WD and ideally He based) and put it in an external enclosure, it'll be more power efficient, significantly less likely to fail and be simple to do. You can even sell your 1TB kit to offset the cost.
 
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Avalon said:
You know when you see someone suggest something so horrific that you actually want them to keep ignoring any and all logic just so you can watch it burn? This is that. It's not just a bad idea, it's the kind of thing that should result in your hard drives being taken into care and you being put on some sort of register.

The obvious solution is to buy a single drive used 10-12TB for the £100-125 it will cost for something not awful (read HGST/WD and ideally He based) and put it in an external enclosure, it'll be more power efficient, significantly less likely to fail and be simple to do. You can even sell your 1TB kit to offset the cost.
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A 10 drive array allows for some nice RAID options and replacement 1tb drives will be cheap as chips. The only real drawback is the extra power consumption.
 
jigger said:
A 10 drive array allows for some nice RAID options
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What nice RAID options does a 10 drive allow for that a more sensible 4-6 drives doesn't?

jigger said:
and replacement 1tb drives will be cheap as chips.
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Yes because they are tiny in capacity and no one wants them - especially not old laptop drives (given that even the budget laptop world has long since moved on from 2.5" hard drives)

jigger said:
The only real drawback is the extra power consumption.
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No it really isn't
 
Avalon said:
You're 9 days late for April Fools, better luck next year.
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Ok.
Armageus said:
What nice RAID options does a 10 drive allow for that a more sensible 4-6 drives doesn't?
Click to expand...
Stick with what you know.
Armageus said:
Yes because they are tiny in capacity and no one wants them - especially not old laptop drives (given that even the budget laptop world has long since moved on from 2.5" hard drives)
Click to expand...
Yeah, replacing ant failed drive will cost peanuts…
Armageus said:
No it really isn't
Click to expand...
Ok.
 
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