2.5 inch drive array

[Marakith]

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!

 

[Marakith]

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?

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?

 

[Marakith]

It's the Optiplex 3060 micro 8th gen

 

[Marakith]

Yeah they're definitely not enterprise grade. The array would be a duplicate of existing data held elsewhere.