The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/a4955 on 2025-06-05 12:33:16.
I'm someone who's looking to build a proper expensive NAS eventually, but that's at least a year away at the moment. I wanna get some kind of better backup than I have now currently (keeping redundant copies of files I care about on my SSD and HDD in my home PC, and occasionally copying to/from my laptop as well). My workplace was throwing out old PCs, and as I was in charge of securely wiping them (used nwipe), and was allowed to keep them after wiping since they were going to ewaste otherwise (nothing was so important on them that they needed to be destroyed). These drives have been running in a server for 5-6 years, then sat on a shelf for another several years. They have around 50,000 power on hours each, however given I know how this office works I suspect there was proportionally far less reads/writes than the average used office hard drive.
Should I bother to set up a quick and dirty NAS backup with them? Given the risk I would most likely use all 3 in RAID 1, but I've still heard bad things about drives from the same batch failing around the same time, and one of them has already failed (there used to be 4). I've got them for free, so if nothing else I might as well occasionally back up crudely/manually by just plugging em in and copying to them every few months (I'm a set and forget guy, I can't see myself doing it more often). But should I invest the time and money to make a low end NAS that properly backs up certain folders to it automatically, or should I not even bother with drives this old?