Best use for a bunch of SATA drives?

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wildbill001

Weaksauce
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Jun 2, 2012
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I have come into possession of a bunch of SATA drives ranging in size from 160gb to 2tb. Specifically:
  • 2 - 160gb
  • 1 - 300gb
  • 3 - 400gb
  • 1 - 320gb
  • 1 - 500gb
  • 1 - 2tb

At the moment I'm using them as backup-media, i.e., plugging them into a spare power-supply and an eSATA, mounting them up on my Windows system and copying files as I remember. But I'm thinking there must be a more efficient way to use these?

Ideally, I'd like to somehow "bundle them all up" into some sort of logical volume or something and treat them all as one big drive. But I am not sure if that if possible. I would like to have a way to replace existing disks with something larger as these older drives die. Not losing data when I do so would be a big plus.

Let's assume two scenarios:
  1. Price is no object is setting up the "infrastructure"
  2. A budget of about $200 for setting up the "infrastructure"
"Infrastructure" would be defined as additional cards, software, etc. over and above a motherboard, memory, and a tower-style case.

What would you suggest?

TIA.

Bill W
 
Although I would just sell the small drives Snapraid is a very good solution for an HTPC application. Where most data does not change often.
 
If you don't intend to go beyond 2TB per disk in the near term, 1068e based cards are DIRT cheap right now. You likely could get hold of a Dell SAS6 for less than 30 dollars, maybe less than 20 if you scrounge about sufficiently. That should cover you on the hardware front for a while.
 
I would just sell them on a forum or Craigslist and then buy bigger drives. You might be able to get a 4+TB drive with the money you'd make from those.
 
You could use them as external backup drives (get a drive dock, treat them like tapes, basically).

While they're kind of small you could create jobs for specific data that wont fill them. Ex: extra backup for email or other stuff of that sort. When I have spare drives I don't know what to do with that's usually what I do, I just add them to my backup pool.
 
I pool my JBOD in my server using FlexRAID. The parity drive is only updated twice a day, which works nicely for me, but there's a real-time RAID option also. I'm sure there are many similar applications as well.

Dalfo002 said:
If you don't intend to go beyond 2TB per disk in the near term, 1068e based cards are DIRT cheap right now. You likely could get hold of a Dell SAS6 for less than 30 dollars, maybe less than 20 if you scrounge about sufficiently. That should cover you on the hardware front for a while.
Click to expand...
What is the purpose of these cards? I have a 6-port SATA controller (PCI-E 4x) which allows 4 disks to be connected simultaneously at full speed, plus it supports port multipliers.
 
I'm curious as to the make/model of the 6-port SATA controller.

Also,Dalfo002, I'd love to know where to find these 1068e cards you are talking about for $30 or less. All I've found so far are $50-200.

Red Squirrel, you hit it on the head. Treating these drives as tapes is exactly how I'm doing it now with SyncBack (free edition).

But I would like to eventually move to something more along the lines of a NAS or SAN setup.

Bill W
 
timta2 said:
I would just sell them on a forum or Craigslist and then buy bigger drives. You might be able to get a 4+TB drive with the money you'd make from those.
Click to expand...

+1 to this.

Not worth running a bunch of small drives anymore.
 
wildbill001 said:
I'm curious as to the make/model of the 6-port SATA controller.
Click to expand...
It's a Startech PEXSATA24E, based on the Marvell 88SX7042 chipset, which has support for command-based switching, native command queuing, and port-multiplying, plus it fits small form factor cases. The website lists its SRP as £100 but most places seem to sell it for much less; I got it for £50.

The main downside I suppose is it's only SATA 3 Gbps but then SATA 6 Gbps is largely useless for non-SSDs, and I can't imagine many people needing extra ports for SSDs. It also requires a 4x or 16x PCI-E slot because a 1x slot can't run 4 SATA ports at full speed.
 
Because computer hardware depreciates so rapidly, I always try to sell stuff as quickly as possible.

The only thing I can think of with a bunch of old drives is throw them into some type of nas or Windows 8 box and create a storage pool with them.
 
I'm guilty of acquiring much of my hardware from eBay. Lurk long enough and you find some good deals. The SAS6 is often (as in almost always) falsely listed as PERC6, the part number is ucs-61 better to search that way. There are many 1068e cards, I just happen to have the Dell ones.
 
Some sort of drive pooling (Storage spaces, LVM, stablebit, etc). Or, rip the drives apart and make plate mail.
 
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