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I moved from external drives to an HDD dock

#HomeLab

For the sake of my home lab portability, I used external drives and connected them directly via USB. It worked just fine because I used to have a working schedule for my homelab and it didn't run 24/7.

There are two problems with external drives:

  1. The plastic enclosure doesn't allow any airflow and may lead to overheating.
  2. Cheap SATA -> USB adapters that do not pass through the SMART values of the drives

I was planning to switch my home lab to a 24/7 operational schedule. In doing so, I would likely face problems with HDD that I would hardly even know until it was too late.

After evaluating a list of storage options: Homelab Storage. DAS, Docks, Enclousures I finally shucked the drives and put them into an HDD dock.

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