Sounds like you are looking for a RAID case - and time to keep it up and running. I would see it as an opportunity to try out ZFS https://openzfs.org/wiki/Main_Page zfs is ideally suited to working on a bunch of "about to fail" drives - and it might be the easiest at replacing drive while not risking data loss of the alternatives. Just a thought - an interesting PLUG presentation too ;) On Wed, Dec 30, 2020 at 4:40 PM Brian Cluff via PLUG-discuss wrote: > > How many drives are you talking about using. If you have a bunch of them, like 6 to 9 drivers, you could combine them into > 2 or 3 groups of roughly equal size and then make a each chunk a RAID 0 and then RAID those chunks up with either RAID1 or RAID5/6 depending on how much redundancy you want. You could also reserve a couple of drives as spares if you wanted then to be able to automatically rebuild the drive if any of the drives fail. > > Brian Cluff > > On 12/30/20 3:00 PM, Seabass via PLUG-discuss wrote: > > > Weird question: > > I can get a bunch of ancient (~2013) HDDs. Each have varying amounts of space, and few (if any) are ever the same size. > > These were marked to be disposed, though that is just because of age or having plenty that are better. Thus I can take them. However, them being this old, and having found about 3 that eventually broke or never worked, I'm left with this question: > > Because purchasing new drives takes too long (no idea when/if they would arrive), I can take as many of the decommissioned drives I'd like. Seeing as some failed, how does one build a system that is resilient to drives failing? > > It can be reset as much as wanted, hardware is literally in arm's reach, and there is not burning need for it to be up immediately. > There is also massive (comparatively) external drive space and as many live boot USBs as one might desire. > > So how would one build a system that is designed expecting HDD failure regularly? > > --------------------------------------------------- > PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org > To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: > https://lists.phxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss > > > --------------------------------------------------- > PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org > To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: > https://lists.phxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss --------------------------------------------------- PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: https://lists.phxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss