Pretend your only other hardware is a repurposed HP Prodesk and your budget is bottom-barrel
Sell them and buy low budget low power consumption disks that would fit my purpose.
Enterprise-grade usually has enterprise-grade power consumption. From the power saving alone you can buy nice stuff.
Please do not sell used enterprise hard drives, especially if you got them from your employer. This is how those emberrasing company secrets get leaked and we can’t have that can we? :)
Then those disks should have been wiped at the company before they were allowed to leave the building.
Yes!
Yes, they should have been wiped. (and then they should have been fed into a blender if i had my way.) :)
Mash into a thick paste and smooth over wholewheat bread with a dash of salt.
Looking past the folks recommending to sell them, it seems you have a handful of useful responses here (welcome to the internet & endless September). /snark Look past the naysayers, it will be fun and a learning experience just getting these drives up and running - a worthwhile experience IMHO.
I am down a similar path now, with a bunch of SAS drives. What I have learned/experienced so far:
- Forget any USB docking stations or enclosures, they may advertise working for all SAS drives but are hit & miss expensive but cheaply made plastic crap.
- There are a plethora of adapters available online that say you can convert SAS to SATA. Do not believe them - you need a SATA controller that also supports SAS. You may luck out and have a motherboard that has the right SATA chipset that supports SAS, you may not.
As others have mentioned in this thread, the easiest & optimal approach seems to be:
- Get a low end workstation or server that supports SAS in the chipset and the drive bays
- Get a low end workstation or server that supports SAS in the chipset and that you can add the drive bays you need
- Get a low end workstation or server that you can install a controller card that supports SAS
I scored a free workstation from craigslist and one from freecycle, for another project on the workbench.
HTH, and good luck!
(Edited for formatting)
Yup, I ended up frankensteining a nas from various craigslist parts (i actually found a low-power business-class server motherboard that has worked out well for the purpose). Had to get a SAS HBA card and a couple SFF-8087 cables to do the job right, and I grabbed an old gaming case from the 2010’s to hold it all, but it was relatively seamless. I had one of the drives go out already, but luckily I had it in a raid configuration with parity so it was just a matter of swapping out the drives and rebuilding.
It’s been fun and rewarding, for sure! I’m glad I didn’t sell them like these other dweebs told me to lol
You don’t say what the capacity is or how old they are. They might not be worth using.
Sell them on eBay, buy an SSD based device.
