are there any older ex-office mini PCs like the elitedesk, optiplex, thinkstation, etc models that can fit a 3.5" drive? Not looking for anything new and thus expensive, just want some old junker (6/7/8th gen Intel) that can host some light stuff. thanks
Why 3.5" drive? (Just curious).
I’ve found prices aren’t necessarily any better at that size.
they are widely available and cheap.
Not the OP, but capacity: there aren’t 20TB 2.5 drives.
(Or 18, 16, 14, 12, or 10TB ones, for that matter…)
Kinda a dead-end product since laptops are all on SSDs, and enterprises have flocked to SSDs as well and that was essentially the entire market for that size of HDD.
Capacity like that is the only reason I could think of.
Putting that much data on just one drive freaks me out
Raid builds hurt financially up front but can save you from a lot of heartache later, even with larger disks.
Totally. I’ve got an 8TBx4 RAID5 that has about as much space as one 20TB spinning drive, but with the advantage that if one fails I don’t lose anything.
Putting 20TB on one drive though? That’s too risky for me.
I mean, 20TB drives will work in an array just as well as 8TB 😉
Honestly with the price of refurb enterprise drives, it’s really hard not to justify not going that route and just keeping a spare drive formatted on warm standby at all times.
A bit of a digression though, since OP isn’t looking to cram a bunch of drives into an old mini case.
That’s why you use 2 and have backup.
Two is one and one is none.