What is the cheapest way to attach a few external drives to my Small Form Factor debian home server?
I have powered USB 3.0 hub with lots of ports. But not all my drives have enclosures.
I have 2-4 each of 3.5" HDD, 2.5" HDD and 2.5" SSD sitting idle. All SATA. Ideally I’d like to get at least 4 of them attached.
All the hardware I can find on retail (docking stations, enclosures, towers) are really expensive to buy enough of them. Is there some sort of cheap, ugly way to do this? The cost of buying enough enclosures is more than a regular sized PC from my local tech non profit. Should I just buy a new computer? I have spent a lot of time setting this one up, I don’t want to start fresh.
Are enclosures interchangeable if they are the right size and connections? I have some old/small external drives in my junk bin. Can I swap in the larger drives into the old enclosures?
Don’t need NAS, RAID or anything. Just straightforward access to my files.
Do you mean the ones that are sold as drive duplicators? Those were the most affordable per HD of what I found. I don’t really want to have a button that would erase or write over my drive though. That’s asking for trouble. A couple of reviews I read mentioned that the particular devices were really aggressive about power management, and would turn themselves off after 10s or 30s idle. Which sounds very annoying but makes sense if the main thing is to clone drive-to-drive. Not sure if they’re all like that.
Anything? Some of my “portable” type HDDs don’t have external power input. So there must be some situations in which it is feasible?
I have one of these. It’s usb 3.0 only which it sounds like is what you have anyway. It’s not part of my NAS, I just use it when I need to quickly look for something on an old drive, but it’s been pretty reliable for me for the last few years and was cheap, so I have no complaints.