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.
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I mean, cheapest way I think would be to go on aliexpress and find the best price for a USB-SATA adapter and just buy a ton of them. Be careful with power consumption though, spinning up disks can be power hungry and your hub might not like it.
4 bay usb dock? The one that you just attach the bare drive. I think you can find them for $70.
USB sata adapters are like $10 each.
Buy a cheap LSI card on ebay, they can usually be had for around $15-20. Make sure it’s either in HBA or IT mode, or that there’s a way to put it into that mode. If it’s in HBA/IT mode, you can then just use it like more SATA ports. Buy a pack of LSI-SATA cables (there are two kinds, get the kind that includes the SATA power connector). Then you can put the card inside your computer and the drives anywhere that the cables will reach.
Computer is too small to have anything put inside it. Has to be external. And it’s a mac so it is very hostile to fiddling around.
Ah my mistake. As I’m sure you’ve found you can certainly get USB-SATA adapters. They’ll be $15-20 each, so you’d realistically be better off getting 2 2-drive enclosures since that would be about the same price but much cleaner. I’ve used Sabrent for this for a while and they’re fine. There are occasional usb disconnects so it’s not good for anything mission critical. And never do anything port-powered when connecting drives over usb, always use parts that get their own wall power.
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.
never do anything port-powered when connecting drives over usb
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.
This is PCIe, not USB. Although if OP does have an unused PCIe slot they didn’t mention in the post, I do agree a second-hand LSI card is by far the most cost-effective way to connect large amounts of SATA/SAS drives. And you get much better performance than USB as a bonus!
The cheapest way I can think of is a used PCIe HBA card and some SATA power extension cables. Probably $50 or so to connect 8 drives this way.
If you’re set on USB you can often get 4 bay enclosures for around $100 or so, that would the way I’d do it. The downside of single USB adapters is the sheer amount of wires and power supplies you’ll have.
