I’ve got a few 2.5″ 500gb laptop drives which are now redundant – I was going to put them on eBay but for the few quid I’d get for each it’s not really worth it.

It would be handy to get an enclosure for these drives, which is seen by my MacBook as one large disk – resulting in a few TBs of useable backup space. Anyone know if something like this is available, or what terms I’d search for to go about looking for one?

What you’re looking for is a NAS drive – but I think the cost would be way more than just buying a large new external USB drive

Ah always wondered what a NAS drive actually was! Cheers will look around – but yeah, not cheap.

Can you daisy-chain them together and use software to set them up as a RAID array?

Clunky and old-school, but cheap.

Bung them in an old PC, install FreeNAS and off you go, instant cheapy NAS server 🙂

Look at the Synology NAS enclosures, they might do what you want.

An older model NAS second hand would be good for basic use.
I still use a 6 year old model with no issues. It does less of the magic stuff, but if all you want it for is basic storage, anything will do.

2.5″ drives may require an adapter to fit in many NAS enclosures. 2.5 is pretty uncommon.

If it’s just a bunch of disks you have lying about you could use something like a Drobo.

Edit… ah missed the bit about it being the smaller drives.

What you’re looking for is a NAS drive

Unless you have some other requirement for it to be a NAS, I’d rather go for DAS. Just seems more reliable than doing it over the network.

If you want the cheap as buttons solution (but messy to look at)you will find on ebay 2.5″ external USB 3.0 enclosures for a £3-5 each. A powered usb 3.0 hub shouldn’t cost too much either. Stick that lot together and plug it into your mac where you can create a simple RAID array out of them which is presented as a single disk.

^ That sounds sensible as a cheap solution.
The more I think about it though -and it pains me to say this – I’d be tempted to bin them. A 2TB USB disk is only £49 and I’ve just signed up to an online backup place that offers 10TB for £39pa

A NAS is usually a bit more than just storage these days. It’s a home server.

However those with multiple bays will allow you to configure them in various ways of RAID, and exposes the whole lot as a single volume by default. Stuff like Synology will give you shares over the network to it that by default will be stuff like Music, Videos, etc. But you can configure it how you like and create whatever shares you like.

Synology have fancy things for cloud-like storage to sync from devices to the NAS (it’s in the “cloud” but it isn’t, it’s a private cloud on your NAS, so if that dies, it’s gone. Unless you back it up 😉 ).

Or you can use standard backup software on PC/Mac/whatever to a share on the NAS.

p.s. with RAID you have various options. Just bundle everything as one big store, stripe it for speed, and/or have a disc or two as redundancy in case one dies (less storage space but can cope with disks dying without losing everything).

Surprised no one has mentioned it yet.. but the keyword/buzz phrase you’re after is JBOD. (just bunch of disks). any multiple drive enclosure that supports that does what you want (NAS box or USB connected).

I always thought it was Just a Big Old Disk – you learn something new…

I’d be tempted to bin them

TBH that’s what I’d do. Online storage, or even a big external USB drive, is so cheap these days it hardly seems worth bothering with some cobbled together mess of drives.

Bigearedbiker – what software do you use to make those separate disks appear one large disk? That might do, with sata to usb connectors…

I already have a constant backup of business data, this was just an idea to make use of them and have a second backup, y’know, just in case.

As for a media server, I’d like to keep music and movies for the family separate – I’ve got a network capable Voyager Air which can do all that.

So a JBOD enclosure could also present them as one contiguous space?

Cloud storage is almost a viable option these days as well, but it’s just the access – having to rely on a connection and bandwidth. I like having essential stuff physically on hand… Maybe I’m just old fashioned!

Cloud storage is almost a viable option these days as well, but it’s just the access – having to rely on a connection and bandwidth. I like having essential stuff physically on hand… Maybe I’m just old fashioned!

Alex Simon – what’s the name of your cloud storage for £39pa?

Bung them in an old PC, install FreeNAS and off you go, instant cheapy NAS server

Probably what I’d do TBH. Cheap and cheerful.

Surprised no one has mentioned it yet.. but the keyword/buzz phrase you’re after is JBOD. (just bunch of disks)

Because it’s a really bad idea in this context. A single drive failure will bring down the entire array, the only time you’d want to use it is if you didn’t care about the data or had redundancy via other means (eg, it’s part of a cluster).

leelovesbikestoo – Member

Alex Simon – what’s the name of your cloud storage for £39pa? http://www.hubic.com
I read a few reviews and it seems basic but good (basic is fine for me).
I’d ummmed and ahhhed for ages before this.
I started syncing 2TB of data immediately using their PC app on the 27th and it’s been syncing ever since (weekday mid-day). Currently at 200GB.

Because it’s a really bad idea in this context.

Drobo is sort of a halfway house. I think you just stick a bunch of disks in there and you tell it what level of failure you want to be able to survive (e.g. 1 disk out of 4) and it’ll sort out the mirroring/striping across whatever bunch of disks it has installed (they don’t need to be the same type or size) and does it all on the fly.

Though given that hard drives are so cheap, re-using old ones isn’t such a big deal these days.

I have a question that may be relevant to this thread.

I have an older Mac which has a dodgy graphics card, so it shuts down if it tries to do anything mildly ‘graphicy’ (Photoshop, video etc). However it still operates fine otherwise. It has four internal HDD bays. It is significantly more powerful than my iMac (which struggles with anything that uses large files like RAW and video). Is there a way to harness the power of the Mac pro, yet bypass it’s graphic card by using the iMac as the work station? It’s the CPU and lack of RAM in the iMac that makes it struggle. Is that what a ‘server’ does?

It’s quite straight forward to setup RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Doughnuts) under OSX:

Use Disk Utility to Create a RAID 1 (Mirror) Array

EDIT: It sounds like newer versions of OSX have dumbed down the disk utility so you might need third party software depending on what you run.

I used to run an old PC as a NAS server but to be honest it’s costly to run 24/7, noisy and I was concerned about fire risk.

Chugging away with a 300W+ PSU (okay, maybe drawing a third of that). I kept going through PSUs as clearly home PC ones are not good at running tucked away in a dusty environment 24/7. More concerning is the PSUs went with a bang and smoke! Thankfully was in the house each time. My Synology NAS is pretty quiet other than drive noise, very compact and around 40W with a simple brick PSU rather than bulky big PSU with fans and big caps that can go bang. It will in theory go down to 20W if the discs are allowed to hibernate but mine are always active as I run a mail and web server off it.