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?
>
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