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Are these external USB drives? You can certainly plug those in all over the place, but it’s not a scable, long term solution.

Shuck the drives if they’re external and just use them as normal drives

And you can’t daisy chain modern drives in the same sense that old SCSI / PATA drives used to be connected, but you could get a drive bay to fit an existing PC - I had one that put 4x 3.5" drives into a 3 bay 5.25" space… wasn’t great but did the job.

But, you’ll want to get the drives into some kinda array - could be a JBOD initially, but you will NEED good backups as any drive failure = total loss of it’s files.

Perhaps backup each drive to… somewhere… create an array and then restore all your data into that new array.

Total available storage of RAID is less than the total space in all the drives due to checksums, duplication, etc.

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Squizzy@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
Yeah it’s like 20 500gb bare drives ripped from equipment. Not sure how they are formatted, I need to get a software that lets me see if there is anything on them and then format then, just changed to Linux and it isn’t always seeing them.

I just want to get a bit of use and centralise all mynfiles while I move pc

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- Cyber@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  Linux should see most formats… you might need to install something to read NTFS… but if they’re FAT32, most distros have thst installed by default.
  
  If you can’t read them, and there’s nothing on there that you need to recover, then just zero them and check them with a full SMART scan, then you’ll know if they’re reliable before wasting time with a RAID array that keeps chewing up drives.
  
  But, I don’t know of any mobos that’ll connect that many drives…
  
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  - Squizzy@lemmy.world ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Could you suggest or link to the program to tst them and read them?
    
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    Cyber@feddit.uk ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Just basic commands will get you most of the way there… lsblk, fsck, etc.
    
    You can check the formatting and partitioning with something like gparted (a GUI for parted)
    
    For SMART, use smartctl or gsmartcontrol for a GUI
    
    Note: external USB enclosures / docks / adapters / etc. rarely pass SMART data, so you’d need to actually plug it into a mobo to check that.
    
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