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.



I started my Home lab adventure with a pi 4, still have it sure it has gone through many different OS’s and has been used for several different things and worn several different hats but it is still working. I think it has found its forever place in my home lab as a HAOS server with the POE hat booted off of a USB drive.
The only working things in my home lab that are not pi’s are: my printer, my wifi router, and the ISP modem. I have finally got around to ordering another pi 5 to act as my firewall so that modem will be switched to pass through. When I get that setup I will have a pi zero 2 to retire as my wireguard host.
I have 2 pi 5’s running pihole, one of them runs a bunch of other services while the other runs my arr stack and Jellyfin. I have a pi 5 that will host my domains, and hopefully email server(s).
I have plans to get another to replace my AppleTV as the media server in the not to distant future. I had plans to use one to act as an audio amp in my home theatre set up, I may look at that again.
Who knows just for shits and giggles I may find some way to turn a pi into a wifi router with VLANS and a bunch of wifi APs.