I usually just yolo and throw them into the pool but my last drive I just did a long SMART test and it came up clean so into the pool it went.

One can also do a badblocks run if you don’t mind waiting the extra time to do so and can understand the logs.

Mmm, sure but it can be a bitch to get booting again if you don’t know what you’re doing and sometimes when you do. Lol

I’d do it with gparted and if you’re using uefi then you need to grab that partition too and that’s where may run into a problem that requires you to know how to work with on your particular system bios.

Typical cloning tools will just wipe what’s there, gparted let’s you copy individual partitions and paste them on another disk. Not a lot of people know that. :)

Available on just about every Linux iso, can easily be installed if it isn’t, and has its own iso of you need something dedicated.

Network interface card.

10 gig or more?

So a nas with tons of storage, high speed nic to a desktop, and a dock to attach the old drives for review. From there, it’s just a matter of sorting through files and dumping them on the nas. Personally, I’d do it with a Linux PC to avoid pesky windows permissions.

a small x86 box with a couple nics and opnsense would work far better.

Time before failure is impossible to predict but these days, they’ll last far longer than you’ll likely use it for.

Ok. All that is fine. There’s no 3.3v wire to worry about. The drive won’t miss it.

What is this 6 pin you speak of? Are we talking modular psu or OEM? The only molex I’m concerned about is the one that carries 12v, 5v, and a couple grounds. The only 6pin I’m aware of is normally for a GPU and that only has 3 12v wires and grounds.

Maybe some pictures will help.

crimped or molded, doesn’t really matter. it’s only a problem when the conductors in the molded plastic get hot enough to drift till they make contact. if you’re mindful of your currents, it’s fine. molded simply provides a little channel for heat to escape.

you’re not gonna get 3.3v from a molex connection for this. that’s only available on the mobo connector and sata cables directly from the psu.

the 3.3v fix involves taping off those pins on the hard drive so this fix isn’t really necessary. I’ve yet to find a sata drive that requires 3.3v.

so yes, it’s safe. just don’t go crazy with daisy chains and trying to draw too much power off one molex or sata power connection.

I go thru the floor but my house is made of wood and drywall.

you need to install samba and setup a share on the linux box first.

this is more suited for r/linux4noobs.

Too old and power hungry at this point. Plus the raid controllers of that generation only support up to 2tb.

Aim for at least a T320 or R320.

just a sas controller, everything else works as usual.

Nah, the virtual kvm in the remote management on them doesn’t work anymore. Go for a Rx20 series or newer. Those have a html5 based kvm.

I wouldn’t trust WD with any of their lineups right now. it doesn’t matter which line is still good, treat it all as bad till they fix it.

as far as I can tell, it looks like a standard hib with switchable power to the ports. I have a couple anker hubs that do that. what’s special about this one other than it has a led display in a fancy enclosure?

I do… well, xubuntu but I rarely ever use the gui. it’s only there if I need it and lately it barely works so yay. I primarily access it over ssh anyway and manage everything in docker.

I do have a proxmox box though. didn’t care for truenas. the proxmox box just runs nextcloud and syncthing in their own containers.

I’ve never had to install software to use external media…

you can host on a raspberry pi.

the question shouldn’t be can you host, it should be about what you want to host. there’s tons of things one can host. see the links in the sidebar of this sub’s feed page.