External HDD's as internal devices

[Mike Brown]

Hi all, I will be repurposing an old pc as a basic home storage server. I have a mixture of various hard drives no longer in use and wondering if I can use them all, Some are 3.5" PC drives, 1 is a 2.5" laptop HDD and I have some 2.5" external drives that can be disassembled. Will these work? (Or maybe leave them plug in via USB?) I don't want to go out and buy new drives just yet as the storage server will be just an extra form of a backup and not too crucial at the stage. I will look at upgrading the storage when I can

[Dedayog]

15 minutes ago, Mike Brown said:

Hi all, I will be repurposing an old pc as a basic home storage server. I have a mixture of various hard drives no longer in use and wondering if I can use them all, Some are 3.5" PC drives, 1 is a 2.5" laptop HDD and I have some 2.5" external drives that can be disassembled. Will these work? (Or maybe leave them plug in via USB?) I don't want to go out and buy new drives just yet as the storage server will be just an extra form of a backup and not too crucial at the stage. I will look at upgrading the storage when I can

Rip open the enclosures, you'll most likely see the drives are the exact same as any other drive.  Put them in your PC as you wish.

 

Really, why not try it and see?

[mike_seps]

I know I tore open a LaCie drive and it's just a 2.5" spinner in a fancy case. May as well open yours up and see what you have

[MonkeyBomb]

My 8 bay nas is full of external drives that I shucked.

 

They are just standard sata drives.

[Blue4130]

Not all 2.5 drives are standard sata. WD used (still uses?) a different pcb with usb and no sata on many of their external drives. 

[Mike Brown]

Thanks all. They all seem like standard SATA drives

[FinOxy]

55 minutes ago, Mike Brown said:

Thanks all. They all seem like standard SATA drives

Did they work?
If the drive looks like SATA, I would they most likely are
But multiply different drives can use that connector, 
SAS, SATA, U.2
Running the SAS, Sata and NVMe protocols respecfully.
Basicly, I would have checked the drive P/N before using them

[Blue4130]

25 minutes ago, FinOxy said:

Did they work?
If the drive looks like SATA, I would they most likely are
But multiply different drives can use that connector, 
SAS, SATA, U.2
Running the SAS, Sata and NVMe protocols respecfully.
Basicly, I would have checked the drive P/N before using them

This would be a first if it was the case. I have never read about a shucked drive using SAS or u.2. Only SATA or WD's s**ty usb.

[GhostRoadieBL]

I did this for a few cheap Seagate 8TB drives, they work well enough for general archives of files in Raid1. I've had 2 drives fail already after just 3years when I used them for documents I needed daily and constantly accessing them from multiple computers like a local cloud share, drives just couldn't handle the strain of jumping around the files constantly.

 

most of the external drives I've used don't really have the longevity of "proper" nas drives or enterprise drives if you are stacking them together and hitting them with constant file requests so I tend to avoid running them longterm in any situation where I need constant access to the files. Longterm storage with minimal reads and writes (daily/weekly backups or archives of files kept locally) should keep them going for a lot longer.

 

99% of external drives will be horrible for ZFS arrays so if you are just sticking to networked single drives or the mirrored raid setups you should be fine.