[ale] how to use/reuse a bunch of 2.5 inch drives

[Steve Litt]

On Fri, 27 Nov 2015 08:01:21 -0500
DJ-Pfulio <DJPfulio at jdpfu.com> wrote:

> Ok, you asked....
> 
> No.
> 
> My data is too important to risk on old drives of unknown history.
> 2.5in drives may have an ugly bounce history.
> 
> RAID is useful for HA, not as a backup technique - especially when
> trying to be cheap and simple.
> 
> Spanning volumes across USB3 seems really risky to me. I've seen
> vibrations cause USB connections to drop periodically. In 2002, lost
> 80% of my data when 1 of 3 disks failed. These were concatenated
> disks, not striped. It was a hard-learned lesson. Learned
> backup-religion that day, I did.
> 
> A new $100 4TB holds lots of data and sits on a shelf next to another
> 4TB from a different vendor to hold important data. After 5 more yrs,
> 2 $100/ea 8TB disks will have that job. A few $30 USB docks mean no
> need for enclosures again.
> 
> In short, old drives are useful to give to other people. ;)

I re-use drives all the time.

Start with this: In my daily driver, one physical drive holds all my
data like /home and some other trees containing data I created. When I
build a new computer, I often move that old drive into the new computer.

Now and then I build experimental computers to do stuff that's
difficult in VMs. I don't buy new disk drives for those computers: I
use older drives that just became too small for modern use. Ditto when
I build firewall/router appliances (pfSense in my case). Now it's true
that what I *should* do is build a very low power pfSense box whose
only disk is an SSD. But even when I do that, I'll still need a box,
ready to go, in case my pfSense box goes bad, and that ready to go box
will have an old hard drive. 

In 15 years of having IPCop and OpenBSD/pf and pfSense boxes, I
remember only one time when one of their drives went bad.

So, although I seldom hold actual data in old disks, I still use them
for a lot of non-critical stuff.

SteveT

Steve Litt 
November 2015 featured book: Troubleshooting Techniques
     of the Successful Technologist
http://www.troubleshooters.com/techniques