What to do with old laptop drives? And converting a RAID 1 NAS to JBOD, with backup?

[Eug]

So, after replacing a bunch of drives in laptops and SFF machines with SSDs, I now have a handful of relatively small 2.5 5400 rpm platter drives laying around. I bought a couple of USB 2 enclosures for them but I find I don't use them too much. They range in size from 120 GB to 250 GB.

For real backups I tend to use 3.5" drives with more capacity, and for quick stuff I use USB flash drives.

I'm thinking of just formatting them all to NTFS and putting my video files on them to be connected to my Blu-ray players.

What do you guys do with these things?

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I also have a 2x2 TB NAS = 2 TB RAID 1. I'm thinking of turning it into a JBOD drive. I wasn't thinking RAID 0 since I suspect the bottleneck over my Gigabit network isn't actually the drives, but my Synology 211j itself, which is a budget home model. Making it JBOD would increase its capacity to 4 TB, with about 1.5 TB currently filled. I'd then buy another 3 TB drive and stick it in a USB 2 enclosure for use as a periodic backup for the NAS. The laptop drives don't provide enough storage for a viable backup.

Have any of you had any problems going from Synology's RAID 1 to JBOD? This description doesn't seem particularly user friendly.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

I have a couple of those sitting around too. My Blu-Ray streams from my NAS, so I don't need them even for that. They're in the box in the closet with my 32MB thumb drive and spare ATA/133 cables.

The manpages (man mdadm) should have the info you need to make sense of all those commands. If you read it through and the commands still don't make sense, I wouldn't do it. (More because I don't like executing commands that don't make sense to me, not because I don't think those might work - I truly have no idea.)

I'd probably back it up to the second drive, then convert. If the commands don't work, format the drives into a JBOD and copy everything back. That way if Bad Stuff™ happens, it's no biggie. And you were going to back it all up anyway.