Re-purposing old usb hard drives for DAS/NAS

[drpaine]

This is my first post.  Hello all!  Can anyone offer any advice on how best to repurpose some old external usb hard drives (I'm happy to disassemble and re caddy).

I have 3 x 2TB WD my book and 2 x 3TB.  

My initial consideration was a NAS or DAS like the Qnap TR-004 although Qnap highly recommend only using NAS drives.  I feel redundancy is in order what with the age of drives.

Weighed up against cost, does anyone have any suggestions or advice for continued use or am my best selling and start again with a new NAS system.

 

I'll be using it to store archived multitracks of audio recordings. I'm hoping to combine the drives some how for ease of use.  Even potentially use direct with a DAW if fast enough.

Many thanks

 

[Faisal A]

You can take the hard drive out of them an build yourself a PC and use that as a NAS. If you have a 2.5 inch hard drive you can use a sata and sata power and plug it into a motherboard or buy a server. If you have 3.5 inch hard drives you can get a dedicated case from ebay

[Faisal A]

This server has 6 3.5 inch beys so you can put the hard drives in there, It has 16gb of RAM too. You could use freenas or windows server 2019 available from microsoft eval centre which is free for 180 days

Edited November 25, 2019 by LogicalDrm

[mariushm]

Some have a tiny circuit board that converts SATA to USB, so you can simply  open the case and unscrew / pull out the adapter board and you have a regular drive and you use the hard drive for your needs.

If you're unlucky, they're custom circuit boards on the hard drive itself, with no way of connecting a SATA cable to the drive.

 

No way of knowing without opening the cases of those external drives.

 

[Olaf6541]

3 hours ago, drpaine said:

or am my best selling and start again with a new NAS system.

New NAS systems dont come with harddrives so youll need them anyway.

3 hours ago, drpaine said:

(I'm happy to disassemble and re caddy)

Have you opened them and checked to see if you can completely strip them from the external case? Just want to make sure you can treat them as standard internal drives without having plastic leftovers glued to the drive itself or some other weird stuff manufacturers do... and check the connector if its sata or something else as mariushm mentioned.

 

Also what has your preference: building a custom NAS yourself, a prebuilt NAS or a DAS?

[Salacious B Crum]

Be advised that many external drive enclosures have drives with the 3.3v pin issue where you need to mask/tape to have the drive seen and functional in a regular system so I would look into that related to your drives as it will be quite frustrating building a NAS and not know why your drives didn't show up for the party. I have a Dell R710 and have been quite happy with it (also own an R410) running unRAID there were issues that needed to be addressed for it to work but in the end it was easy to configure and get going

[timdine]

9 hours ago, mrbilky said:

Be advised that many external drive enclosures have drives with the 3.3v pin issue where you need to mask/tape to have the drive seen and functional in a regular system so I would look into that related to your drives as it will be quite frustrating building a NAS and not know why your drives didn't show up for the party. I have a Dell R710 and have been quite happy with it (also own an R410) running unRAID there were issues that needed to be addressed for it to work but in the end it was easy to configure and get going

I'd never noticed this with my shucked drives, but all the newer ones are Seagates.  I've just brought home a WD drive and now I'll know what to do if that happens.

[seagate_surfer]

I would avoid the use of USB devices for internal use, external hard drives are manufactured with a certain use in mind and that use is not for main units but for data that must be stored and accessed frequently, but most of them not in a daily basis, since the units are intended to be a data backup, it is not made to support heavy writes but still good enough to contain data.

[Salacious B Crum]

17 hours ago, seagate_surfer said:

I would avoid the use of USB devices for internal use, external hard drives are manufactured with a certain use in mind and that use is not for main units but for data that must be stored and accessed frequently, but most of them not in a daily basis, since the units are intended to be a data backup, it is not made to support heavy writes but still good enough to contain data.

The many reports I've seen suggest the original units in fact had WD red drives which are for NAS use think when it was widely reported that folks were shucking them they went to white label but even those were reported to be red drives just the label has changed

[seagate_surfer]

On 9/7/2019 at 3:03 PM, mrbilky said:

The many reports I've seen suggest the original units in fact had WD red drives which are for NAS use think when it was widely reported that folks were shucking them they went to white label but even those were reported to be red drives just the label has changed

I see what you are saying but still I wouldn't do it (I panic ), I've even seen people shucking external devices because they find it on sale and cheaper than internal devices but 2 thigs happen when you do that, the first one is that you void your warranty and the second one like I said is that you will end up with a product that cannot provide you as much longevity like the ones made for that particular use...

 

[Salacious B Crum]

23 hours ago, seagate_surfer said:

the first one is that you void your warranty

I don't know I agree its risky as I sure wouldn't put an altered drive into my machines but from what I've been reading they will honor or are required to provide the warranty although I have no first hand knowledge to confirm that just all the talk on the forums and youtube but I put to much time and money into my servers to play Russian roulette so I agree with on that   Oh and although I run WD reds in my arrays I trust my parity to a seagate drive

[seagate_surfer]

4 hours ago, mrbilky said:

-I trust my parity to a seagate drive-

Ah good! I'm glad to hear that!  have a nice day!

[drpaine]

Thank you everyone for your input here! I'm most grateful.  As these are older drives... warranty is out the window anyhow. Just feels bad throwing 4 x drives away.  Especially as I could do with the storage. @Faisal A Thanks for your suggestions. Equally everyone else regarding possible pitfalls.  I'll let you know how it pans out

[UrbanFreestyle]

On 9/9/2019 at 10:26 PM, seagate_surfer said:

I see what you are saying but still I wouldn't do it (I panic ), I've even seen people shucking external devices because they find it on sale and cheaper than internal devices but 2 thigs happen when you do that, the first one is that you void your warranty and the second one like I said is that you will end up with a product that cannot provide you as much longevity like the ones made for that particular use...

 

I mostly agree with this except when i shucked 2 4tb external drives and found WD Reds inside

[NelizMastr]

18 minutes ago, UrbanFreestyle said:

I mostly agree with this except when i shucked 2 4tb external drives and found WD Reds inside

Most WD MyBooks and Elements 3.5" boxes have white label Reds inside  

[seagate_surfer]

1 hour ago, UrbanFreestyle said:

I mostly agree with this except when i shucked 2 4tb external drives and found WD Reds inside

I mean, yes! The model inside an external disk may be the same, but not its construction or manufacturing structure, whatever you call it. A unit that is prepared to store data for long periods of time is generally not focused on daily performance like hard drives made for internal use purposes, it could be programming or something else, but using a unit that is not intended to be used as your primary driver as your real daily driver only increases the chances to find premature damage.

[GuruOfNothing]

Don't toss them, shuck them. I run purely shucked drives because I am not paying the ludicrous prices for retail drives when the shucked ones are just fine. In the case of the WD externals, they are usually always RED's anyway. Even the white labels are RED drives, just produced for this kind of equipment. Since the warranty is over anyway, you have nothing to lose. With that said, BACKUP BACKUP BACKUP! Makes no difference what drives you use if you have no backups of your data. If you are doing this for a NAS, you are just fine. I run WAY over 4 times the storage i need and run raid and backup copies. I know many people that run 100's of TB's of shucked drives and have no issues with them, any more than what retail drives would offer. And if your warranty fails you with a retail drive and your data is gone, it's just as gone as with a shucked drive.It just stings a tiny bit less because it didn't cost quite as much. Did I mention BACKUP!?

[seagate_surfer]

It's fine! The shucked drives can also work within another system, but it would not rely on a shucked unit as much as I do or a unit prepared or manufactured to be a main drive.