2.5 inch drive array

Marakith · Saturday at 19:45

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!

Avathar77 · Saturday at 19:57

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?

Marakith · 2026-04-05T06:13:31+0100

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?

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?

Rroff · 2026-04-05T06:23:45+0100

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).

Marakith · 2026-04-05T07:19:46+0100

It's the Optiplex 3060 micro 8th gen

Armageus · 2026-04-05T09:06:20+0100

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).