The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/Void_0000 on 2024-10-11 09:27:20.
I have an old laptop that I've repurposed as a somewhat decent home server, the problem is that it really does not have much storage at all, so I'm trying to come up with a cheap way to fix this problem.
A bunch of local resale sites where I live are pretty much always full of fairly cheap drives (~5-10$/tb), with the notable downside that they're usually not very big drives (500gb to 1tb usually, sometimes 2tb). My plan is to buy a bunch of these and add them all together to get something approaching good capacity (this isn't really intended to store any data I can't afford to lose, and I plan on making backups of anything important anyway so the drives being second hand isn't too concerning to me).
The problem is that most ways of connecting a sata hard drive to a device with USB seem to be so expensive that the overall price per-tb starts to approach the cost of just buying a brand new external HDD. My main issue comes from the fact that to make this work I would need to connect lots of small drives rather than a few large ones, and since the cost of the actual "connection" part is per-drive, the per-tb price starts to suffer pretty quick.
Solutions I've considered:
- USB DAS enclosures: even the cheapest ones I can find are ~20$/drive, assuming <=1tb drives, even at 5$/tb for the actual drive it's still easily less expensive to buy brand new external HDDs (~20$/tb). Is there anything cheaper? I don't need any extra features other than holding hard drives and letting me access them via USB.
- Throwing a bunch of hard drives in a box and connecting them all with SATA to USB(+12v barrel jack for 3.5") adapters and a USB hub: SATA to USB adapters that support an external power connection for 3.5" drives are also about 20$ each, with the exception of some suspiciously cheap ones on aliexpress that only cost around 5$. Also, this sounds like a total mess. Is there maybe such a thing as a many-to-one SATA-to-USB adapter?
- Docks: For some reason, USB hard drive docks seem to be significantly cheaper than both of the above solutions, even though they should be using the same hardware, though I have no idea why. This would be a bit of a pain because I'm also limited in terms of physical space and docks tend to use up a lot more of it than enclosures. Maybe I could buy a cheap one and scavenge the electronics from it to make something smaller (basically solution #2)?
Lastly, I've read you can connect a near unlimited number of drives if you have a spare pcie card slot for a controller, though I don't really know anything about how this works. Naturally, my laptop is... a laptop, and so doesn't really have spare anything, let alone an actual pcie slot, but it does have both an ethernet port and a wifi card that I know is easily removable. I've seen people use the slot freed up by removing the wifi card to attach entire graphics cards to their laptops, so I wonder if this could work for attaching hard drives too? This would really be my last resort, though, because I'd rather not have to put a hole in the laptop's case and having separate physical interfaces for WAN and LAN is pretty convenient.