Hey, I’m back with more home server questions. :)

I’ve got a laptop running as my home server. I have previously removed my CD drive to add an HDD caddy for a total of two hard drives - a SATA SSD and a SATA HDD.

Now, I’m running out of storage a little, and I have a spare HDD that I’ve currently hooked up to my desktop PC that I could connect to my server. What are my options here?

I’ve found HDD adapters that you can connect via USB. But what are the read/write speeds for these and would they sufficient for a server? Or should I invest in some kinda hard drive bay that allows for multiple hard drives to be slotted into and connected (is that a NAS?)?

Open to any input here, preferably tge cheaper the better.

  • Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafeEnglish
    10·
    5 hours ago

    Are the read-write speeds sufficient for a server?

    Depends.

    For most of us, most use-cases, yes. I have 2 externals on USB that are no slower than my ancient NAS that only does 100Mbit Ethernet (honestly they’re probably faster).

    Now if you’re running a transactional database, then externals are bad for throughput, but also stability/reliability and heat.

    One thing I rarely see mentioned here is that external drives lack any cooling. This is fine for most uses-cases where people will intermittently copy data to them. But of you try sustained writes you can watch the temps climb in minutes. Which is why both of mine have old, large case fans on them (duct taped in place no less). They’re really quiet especially since I run them at 5v instead of 12V.

    Externals are generally recommended against of it can be avoided. But of it’s what you have, run it, just know the lifespan is likely limited, and they’re not to be trusted from stability standpoint - always have redundancy/backups for important data.

    My externals are part of my local redundancy - they replicate my main data drive, which is also replicated to my ancient NAS. So I have 3 local copies of everything.