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.
@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.
Spinning rust has two big advantages over flash: It’s relatively cheap, and it retains data even if powered off for a long time. It’s great for:
- Backups
- Bulk media storage
- Write-heavy tasks if you don’t want them hitting your SSD
- Huge games if your SSD doesn’t have lots of free space (Linux is good at keeping most games responsive even if loaded from slow storage)
I use mechanical drives in NAS servers and as swappable storage
