Hi folks,
Hope you’re having a lovely day.
Looking for suggestions on what to do with 4 x 4TB Western Digital My Passport. I used to use rock these bad boys before I made the jump to Synology NAS.
What do you guys do with old external hard drives?
Cold backups
Put them somewhere if your house burns down you still have the important stuff
OK, now I’ll need to find an offsite location to store these backups.
I have a couple MyPassports for cold backups and one I use for projects between my Desktop and Laptop.
There’s an ATX case next to you.
That’s a NR200P ITX and I’ve used all available storage space in there.
In that formfactor. I would look into the NAS pi-Hats. There are a couple that take 4-5 2.5" drives. You could go for a tiny efficient builld.
Thanks for the suggestion. I’m not familiar with that but I’m guessing it’s somewhat building a NAS with Raspberry Pi? Will look into it. Cheers!
Off site backup
I usually shuck them for internal drives, but the 2.5s like that WD did a funny for them to convert the drive controller to be an actual USB port, not a SATA port. Which is crappy for you wanting to really do anything shucking wise.
Woah, do you know any database of which kinda external drives are fucked like this?
Pretty much, most of the 2.5s are like that. The ones that are marketed as external drives. let me correct myself on that bit.
The only manufacturers left are WD, Toshiba and Seagate.
WD and Toshiba have the USB interface integrated in the mainboard. Seagate 2.5" externals are regular SATA drives with a detachable interface.
All other third party externals can have drives from any of the manufacturers and may vary from time to time.
Sandisk Pro/G-Tech/G-Technology is owned by WD and LaCie is owned by Seagate.
Yeah, I was hoping there’s another option than just cold backup. Too bad I can’t just shuck these guys. Thanks for your response. Cheers.