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Ask Slashdot: DIY NAS For a Variety of Legacy Drives?

Posted by timothy on from the thinking-about-a-giant-USB-hub dept.

An anonymous reader writes "I have at least 10 assorted hard drives ranging from 100 GB to 3 TB, including external drives, IDE desktop drives, laptop drives, etc. What's the best way to setup a home NAS to utilize all this 'excess' space? And could it be set up with redundancy built-in so a single drive failure would cause no data loss? I don't need anything fancy. Visibility to networked Windows PCs is great; ability to streak to Roku / iPad / Toshiba etc would be great but not necessary. What's the best way to accomplish this goal?"

2 of 260 comments (clear)

  1. Not worth it. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Those older drives are probably failures just waiting to happen. With the cost of the hard drive space continually dropping, just use new drives. It's not worth screwing around with old ones for anything other than salvaging old data off them, even though the urge to do so is strong in the more frugal among us.

    1. Re:Not worth it. by ZeroSumHappiness · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I agree to an extent. Take anything SAS or SATA that's 1TB or greater and re-think the project with just those. Sell or recycle the rest of the drives. Depending on your needs the remainder should be RAID-1, 5 or 6'd (using software RAID if speed isn't an issue) and then put on an OpenFiler or FreeNAS box. Anything non-replaceable should then be backed up to a respectable backup provider in addition to your home-grown solution.

      We need more information though -- what are your actual drive sizes and what do you want to put on this NAS?