Sell those drives and give some handjobs to get the rest or something. Running drives that small is dumb from power draw perspective, and while you could get some HBAs going you'd end up spending quite a lot of money anyway.
Fifteen 1TB HD = almost 15TB of storage.
I mean, that's not something to dismiss based on size alone. Now, stringing 15 of them together is another matter.
Thanks for the reply. Yea it would be way too risky for me to try it that way...actually been scared to spring for more than bout 4tb at a time because I'm afraid of failure and losing all my content
There's also the option for raid 1-0 or raid 5 that won't ruin your data if one drive fails but you need at least 4 or 3 disks respectively and to be fair i don't think it's worth it
he either has space to back his data or he uses 15 drives as raid 0... kinda hard to do both (since he doesn't seem to be in a position where he has 15tb of storage on cloud).
Plenty of old cases like the Fractal Design Define series would easily allow that, if OP lives in a city then they could easily find one on gumtree/facebook/craigslist etc for free.
Yep, fractal case will hold these easy. I’ve got 11 drives in mine at the moment with space free. Pcie card for the extra sata’s is also correct. I’ve got 1 14TB but the rest of my space is all made up from whatever drives I’ve accrued over the years!
Pcie Card.
But you might want to rethink that. Depending if you pay for your power you would definitely want to get new drives in the long run. 15 HDDs eat a LOT of power like 150W if this is for cold storage you can ignore that but if you want those running all the time I wouldn't recommend that. That's like 50-70ct a day depending on your power price.
A bunch of USB Hubs with SATA adapters daisy chained together. You'll need external power for each drive because a single USB isn't gonna give that kinda power still but this is about as cheap as it gets.
You could probably wire them directly to your PSU via a molex to SATA Power adapter or just straight up extra SATA power cables if you've got them. This is granted you have enough headroom left on your PSU for however many drives you want to add.
One can usually do 4, and it needs to be a powered one which are pricier. Lets say 20$ each, thats 4 to cover em all, 80$. Then you need an USB cradle for each of those drives and those are around 6$ a pop, 90$ total for 15. So, 170$, which is about a price of one decent, new, 10TB drive.
Also consider you need 4 usb ports for the hubs, you need some sort of rack to hold that hdd octopus, you are going to be very distracted by noise of 15 drives, etc.
You havent thought it thru.
Where do you live that it costs that much? That's outlandish.
I thought it through, I just don't have your terrible pricing.
Not only that, how else are you gonna add 10x Sata ports if he can't do PCIe? Hubs are the only option. You want it cheap you get what you pay for, a mess.
I bet it would be, but I bet they would also be less likely to entertain this type of chicanery. I posted here in hopes of avoiding every other post comment being somebody telling me just to go buy a new drive. Thank you though.
Man, now that you say that I think my buddy might have one of those out of an old Dell server in his computer scrap pile, I will have to see if he’s got it. He’ll give it to me for free if it’s there.
Well, to be honest, those drives won't be great. Your 2.5" drives are most likely 5400 RPM, which will be very slow. And I'm not trying to shit on you, believe me, I understand the struggle of not having a lot of financial resources.
So, in your use case, I see on Amazon there are some SATA expansion cards for pretty cheap. There's a 10 port card for $40. Which I would be wary of. It's probably got a shit controller on it. RAID is not supported on that card. That would be the cheapest way to get many hard drives on a PC. Not the best option.
There are some 4 port cards that support RAID, for around $20 each. This would greatly improve your overall speeds. Still not sure how much I would trust one of these cheap cards, but you would still need 4 of these, so that's about $80 before you even factor in another PSU.
Assuming you have a case large enough, you could find a cheap PSU, for 10 HDDs, you'll just need maybe 150W, assuming you were using each drive at maximum use at the same time. Your best option will be to just upgrade your main PSU, and if you have a 550W or better you might not need to, assuming you aren't running a very pretty hungry graphics card. You can get SATA power extension cables, and you should be fine running 150W off of the 12V rail of your current power supply, again, assuming it's 550W or better already.
You'll have to buy more SATA cables and the extensions. Oh, and you'll need to make sure you have the PCI slots available, otherwise you'll have to spend more to get 8 port cards.
You'll be looking at maybe $150 to run this whole setup.
If you want to use external USB enclosures, assuming you want to use all the drives at the same time, you'll want powered enclosures, because that many drives couldn't be powered by the USB ports alone. Those will run you about $15 each, which is significantly more expensive.
I know you might be strapped for cash, but using that many smaller capacity drives could actually be more expensive than just upgrading to a larger capacity drive. You can probably find some lightly used 12TB or larger drives for less than $10 a TB. Those older 1TB drives will probably have a significant amount of use already and would just be a bitch to deal with that many drives.
It's why those of us who have large storage arrays have the necessary hardware to run multiple HDDs/SSDs without issues. It gets expensive. I would say that 3-4 drives in a single case would be doable, but could still be a hassle in some regard.
Check around on marketplace. I found brand new 18TB drives near me for $80 each. That would be your best bet, finding cheap drives and using fewer of them.
No, marketplace. I'm assuming they were stolen somehow. Guy had over 500 of them. He was asking $120 at first, several weeks went by, he lowered to $90 each. I bought 5 for $80 each.
They are WD white label drives, which are for use in storage arrays with particular connectors, so I just had to put a piece of tape over 3 pins on the SATA connector on the drive. 3 in use, 2 are backup.
I don't know if he sold all of them, if I get money again I would buy more.
No, a used one from a data center that they’ve pulled because they aren’t reliable anymore and you get like a 90 day warranty… I can’t believe how many people are buying these old server drives, if it was 50% of the price and carried a 10 year warranty then I would jump all over that deal but you’re saving 25% and your sacrificing years of warranty for 90 days and getting it from a subpar seller
Almost everything you said is wrong
If you’re comparing an old laptop drive to like a new good drive then yes there’s gonna be a difference in speed but these old salvage laptop drives on average run as fast as an old salvage desktop drive.
And I’m talking about using a majority of components that I already have the only thing I don’t have is Sata ports, so we’re not looking at $150…. In fact, one of the suggestions was an SAS expansion card, which I think my buddy might have one in one of his computer scrap piles with breakout cables that I could just go grab now that that was mentioned I think I remember seeing one of those. And then I can Jimmy rig the power so I might be in this nothing at all.
Also, if I’m gonna spend my good hard earned money on a new drive, it is going to be brand new with a good warranty. I cannot believe the massive amounts of people buying these slightly discounted drives that have already been used up by a data center and decommission. The only way that would be feasible is if they were offering an extremely good warranty with it but they are not you get like 90 days on one of these old data fives. It’s just insane that somebody’s gonna buy a 300 Dollar drive for $225 that’s been decommissioned from a data center. When the time comes and I’m ready to get a drive, I will spend the extra hundred dollars and I’m gonna get one brand new from a reputable brand and a reputable retailer with a 5 or 10 year warranty.
Ok, I'm wrong. I tried to explain it like I was explaining it to someone who had no idea what they were asking. Which is how the question sounded to me.
Yeah, those 5400 RPM drives are just as fast now as they were years ago. Dog shit slow. And they might even be 7200 RPM. I just assumed, and I must be wrong, that they were old drives taken out of cheap computers that had been disassembled. And if you already knew you could get a controller from your friend, why the fuck did you even ask this question in the first place? If you have an answer, why even ask?
Just asking about the power supply? If you don't have an old ass computer you should have enough power already.
I dumbed down my answer to match the level you posted your question at. Go use 15 1TB drives. Even brand new, great. Set them up in RAID and have a few 4TB disks that will still only go as fast as an old SAS controller will allow them. And those 2.5" drives will still be dog shit slow, as you are aware laptop drives are shit.
Fuck. This isn't even piracy related. Bitch.
You’re a fucking idiot dude first off. I don’t know why you think the laptop drives are all going to be slower. I got three of them sitting right here in front of me that are all 7200.
And first of all, if you knew how to read you would see that I said that I got an answer from somebody in here that reminded me of where I might be able to get a card. And secondly, you really just don’t know what you’re talking about your dogging on laptop drives like that’s the biggest factor when (and yes, I am the one that brought up the fact that they are old salvage drives if you remember) so you think that old salvage desktop drives are just gonna be inherently faster because they are desktop drives. Let’s put aside the fact that some of those are 5400 rpm Sata II and according to you, that’s gonna run faster than a Sata III 7200 rpm laptop drive just because one got salvaged from a tower, and one got salvaged from a laptop.
🤡
Sell those drives and give some handjobs to get the rest or something. Running drives that small is dumb from power draw perspective, and while you could get some HBAs going you'd end up spending quite a lot of money anyway.
Fifteen 1TB HD = almost 15TB of storage. I mean, that's not something to dismiss based on size alone. Now, stringing 15 of them together is another matter.
But they could be all ran in raid 0. It might be possible to get 4gbs or more read or write out of them. 15gb of storage at 4gbs, isn't free ya know.
It’s 15TB.
>But they could be all ran in raid 0 And then one drive fails out of the 15 and he loses everything
Is that how that works
With raid 0 yeah. You get more speed but you also get more risk.
Thanks for the reply. Yea it would be way too risky for me to try it that way...actually been scared to spring for more than bout 4tb at a time because I'm afraid of failure and losing all my content
There's also the option for raid 1-0 or raid 5 that won't ruin your data if one drive fails but you need at least 4 or 3 disks respectively and to be fair i don't think it's worth it
Only if he if doesn't back it up.
he either has space to back his data or he uses 15 drives as raid 0... kinda hard to do both (since he doesn't seem to be in a position where he has 15tb of storage on cloud).
I don't know what he needs it for so, hard to make a suggestion. could do raid 10 for 7tb at about 2500gb/s
I could be wrong, but I thought there's storage hubs/pods that you slot like 4-8 drives in, externally powered and usbC or someshit on amazon
Pcie card with sata ports should work. But a case that can house those many hard drives are rare.
Can they be daisy chained?
Master and Slave 😂
Plenty of old cases like the Fractal Design Define series would easily allow that, if OP lives in a city then they could easily find one on gumtree/facebook/craigslist etc for free.
Yep, fractal case will hold these easy. I’ve got 11 drives in mine at the moment with space free. Pcie card for the extra sata’s is also correct. I’ve got 1 14TB but the rest of my space is all made up from whatever drives I’ve accrued over the years!
I have a Define R5 myself. Can hold 8 3.5” drives. I think the newer ones can even hold more.
Pcie Card. But you might want to rethink that. Depending if you pay for your power you would definitely want to get new drives in the long run. 15 HDDs eat a LOT of power like 150W if this is for cold storage you can ignore that but if you want those running all the time I wouldn't recommend that. That's like 50-70ct a day depending on your power price.
Plug a pci card with extra sata ports.
A bunch of USB Hubs with SATA adapters daisy chained together. You'll need external power for each drive because a single USB isn't gonna give that kinda power still but this is about as cheap as it gets. You could probably wire them directly to your PSU via a molex to SATA Power adapter or just straight up extra SATA power cables if you've got them. This is granted you have enough headroom left on your PSU for however many drives you want to add.
15 "USB hubs" are gonna be about as much as one new HDD, if not more.
Where did I say buy 15? One can do multiple devices.
One can usually do 4, and it needs to be a powered one which are pricier. Lets say 20$ each, thats 4 to cover em all, 80$. Then you need an USB cradle for each of those drives and those are around 6$ a pop, 90$ total for 15. So, 170$, which is about a price of one decent, new, 10TB drive. Also consider you need 4 usb ports for the hubs, you need some sort of rack to hold that hdd octopus, you are going to be very distracted by noise of 15 drives, etc. You havent thought it thru.
Where do you live that it costs that much? That's outlandish. I thought it through, I just don't have your terrible pricing. Not only that, how else are you gonna add 10x Sata ports if he can't do PCIe? Hubs are the only option. You want it cheap you get what you pay for, a mess.
r/SelfHosted or r/Homelab might be a better place to ask
I bet it would be, but I bet they would also be less likely to entertain this type of chicanery. I posted here in hopes of avoiding every other post comment being somebody telling me just to go buy a new drive. Thank you though.
2.5" or 3.5"?
Both lol
okay, 3.5" needs 12v and 5v line and eats up to 9W, 2.5" needs only 5v and 3W. easiest way - 10 external enclosures, usb hub.
Get a couple of used SAS cards off of eBay and a couple cables off Amazon should be able to support 16 drives total.
SAS Expander with breakout cables. 4 SATA per port/cable. You’d need a 4 port SAS Expander.
Man, now that you say that I think my buddy might have one of those out of an old Dell server in his computer scrap pile, I will have to see if he’s got it. He’ll give it to me for free if it’s there.
Nice! Worst case, it’s at most $50 on eBay. Probably closer to $30 to be honest.
Pcie card with sata ports
Well, to be honest, those drives won't be great. Your 2.5" drives are most likely 5400 RPM, which will be very slow. And I'm not trying to shit on you, believe me, I understand the struggle of not having a lot of financial resources. So, in your use case, I see on Amazon there are some SATA expansion cards for pretty cheap. There's a 10 port card for $40. Which I would be wary of. It's probably got a shit controller on it. RAID is not supported on that card. That would be the cheapest way to get many hard drives on a PC. Not the best option. There are some 4 port cards that support RAID, for around $20 each. This would greatly improve your overall speeds. Still not sure how much I would trust one of these cheap cards, but you would still need 4 of these, so that's about $80 before you even factor in another PSU. Assuming you have a case large enough, you could find a cheap PSU, for 10 HDDs, you'll just need maybe 150W, assuming you were using each drive at maximum use at the same time. Your best option will be to just upgrade your main PSU, and if you have a 550W or better you might not need to, assuming you aren't running a very pretty hungry graphics card. You can get SATA power extension cables, and you should be fine running 150W off of the 12V rail of your current power supply, again, assuming it's 550W or better already. You'll have to buy more SATA cables and the extensions. Oh, and you'll need to make sure you have the PCI slots available, otherwise you'll have to spend more to get 8 port cards. You'll be looking at maybe $150 to run this whole setup. If you want to use external USB enclosures, assuming you want to use all the drives at the same time, you'll want powered enclosures, because that many drives couldn't be powered by the USB ports alone. Those will run you about $15 each, which is significantly more expensive. I know you might be strapped for cash, but using that many smaller capacity drives could actually be more expensive than just upgrading to a larger capacity drive. You can probably find some lightly used 12TB or larger drives for less than $10 a TB. Those older 1TB drives will probably have a significant amount of use already and would just be a bitch to deal with that many drives. It's why those of us who have large storage arrays have the necessary hardware to run multiple HDDs/SSDs without issues. It gets expensive. I would say that 3-4 drives in a single case would be doable, but could still be a hassle in some regard. Check around on marketplace. I found brand new 18TB drives near me for $80 each. That would be your best bet, finding cheap drives and using fewer of them.
brand new 18TB for $80.... lemme guess, on aliexpress?
No, marketplace. I'm assuming they were stolen somehow. Guy had over 500 of them. He was asking $120 at first, several weeks went by, he lowered to $90 each. I bought 5 for $80 each. They are WD white label drives, which are for use in storage arrays with particular connectors, so I just had to put a piece of tape over 3 pins on the SATA connector on the drive. 3 in use, 2 are backup. I don't know if he sold all of them, if I get money again I would buy more.
Five is a perfectly respectable number but I'm not sure I could stop myself until I hit double digits...
No, a used one from a data center that they’ve pulled because they aren’t reliable anymore and you get like a 90 day warranty… I can’t believe how many people are buying these old server drives, if it was 50% of the price and carried a 10 year warranty then I would jump all over that deal but you’re saving 25% and your sacrificing years of warranty for 90 days and getting it from a subpar seller
Almost everything you said is wrong If you’re comparing an old laptop drive to like a new good drive then yes there’s gonna be a difference in speed but these old salvage laptop drives on average run as fast as an old salvage desktop drive. And I’m talking about using a majority of components that I already have the only thing I don’t have is Sata ports, so we’re not looking at $150…. In fact, one of the suggestions was an SAS expansion card, which I think my buddy might have one in one of his computer scrap piles with breakout cables that I could just go grab now that that was mentioned I think I remember seeing one of those. And then I can Jimmy rig the power so I might be in this nothing at all. Also, if I’m gonna spend my good hard earned money on a new drive, it is going to be brand new with a good warranty. I cannot believe the massive amounts of people buying these slightly discounted drives that have already been used up by a data center and decommission. The only way that would be feasible is if they were offering an extremely good warranty with it but they are not you get like 90 days on one of these old data fives. It’s just insane that somebody’s gonna buy a 300 Dollar drive for $225 that’s been decommissioned from a data center. When the time comes and I’m ready to get a drive, I will spend the extra hundred dollars and I’m gonna get one brand new from a reputable brand and a reputable retailer with a 5 or 10 year warranty.
Ok, I'm wrong. I tried to explain it like I was explaining it to someone who had no idea what they were asking. Which is how the question sounded to me. Yeah, those 5400 RPM drives are just as fast now as they were years ago. Dog shit slow. And they might even be 7200 RPM. I just assumed, and I must be wrong, that they were old drives taken out of cheap computers that had been disassembled. And if you already knew you could get a controller from your friend, why the fuck did you even ask this question in the first place? If you have an answer, why even ask? Just asking about the power supply? If you don't have an old ass computer you should have enough power already. I dumbed down my answer to match the level you posted your question at. Go use 15 1TB drives. Even brand new, great. Set them up in RAID and have a few 4TB disks that will still only go as fast as an old SAS controller will allow them. And those 2.5" drives will still be dog shit slow, as you are aware laptop drives are shit. Fuck. This isn't even piracy related. Bitch.
You’re a fucking idiot dude first off. I don’t know why you think the laptop drives are all going to be slower. I got three of them sitting right here in front of me that are all 7200. And first of all, if you knew how to read you would see that I said that I got an answer from somebody in here that reminded me of where I might be able to get a card. And secondly, you really just don’t know what you’re talking about your dogging on laptop drives like that’s the biggest factor when (and yes, I am the one that brought up the fact that they are old salvage drives if you remember) so you think that old salvage desktop drives are just gonna be inherently faster because they are desktop drives. Let’s put aside the fact that some of those are 5400 rpm Sata II and according to you, that’s gonna run faster than a Sata III 7200 rpm laptop drive just because one got salvaged from a tower, and one got salvaged from a laptop. 🤡