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Do you still use regular HDD's? Why and what for? (kbin.social)

submitted 2 years ago by datawraith@kbin.social to c/linux@kbin.social

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Do you still use regular HDD's? Why and what for?

I have about 10 Portable 2.5" HDD's I somehow built up over the years, plus an additional 10 2.5" HDD's laying around that aren't in enclosures at the moment. I'm tossing up between wiping them all and disposing of them, and buying an enclosure to use them in a NAS. 7 of them are reasonable at between 2TB and 4TB capacity. It's just, they're so fucking slow. Is it really worth it to keep using HDD's in this day and age, or should I accept that their time has come and throw them out? I think I will just be dissapointed and annoyed with how slow they are if I keep them around and use them for hosting media on a plex server - But I haven't tested them out for that so I'm not sure.

I'm leaning towards wiping and getting rid of them. Any suggestions for a use I might find for them? Are you still using a HDD? Why? What do you use it for? I feel like the time it takes for shit to load on them isn't worth it and it just detracts to heavily from whatever I'm doing on a computer.

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[–] benji@kbin.social 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

@datawraith I haven't used disks in anything other than a NAS for 12 years now. Even now I'm replacing ones that fail and rebuildiing the array with a new one, just a couple months ago. Another generation of SSDs and I think I'll be able to finally retire my NAS and move all my storage to SSD, which will be a relief tbh.

[–] ddnomad 1 points 2 years ago

Cold storage / archiving backups are both valid use cases for hard drives in my opinion.

It really depends what kind of drivers we are talking about. Consumer grade 2.5” drivers are indeed quite slow and not reliable. But some SAS enterprise grade hard drives from 2014 are still working fine and are actually good enough in terms of speed if you access the data on them via wireless network (cause it’s speed is often a bottleneck, not the speed of the drive).

Overall, it’s storage and it can be used. Just make sure to run something like raidz2 / raid6 to minimise a chance of losing your data. And well, you’d need backups too.

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