The putting them in a pile has often crossed my mind, though to be honest the next stage has involved a sledge hammer.
But fortunately despite all this I'm pretty sure I haven't lost any data. As mentioned in another post I'm working my way through them and replacing them all. No idea why a 4TB external is cheaper than an internal drive in the U.K., but the Seagates that I am pulling out of their enclosures are giving me write speeds of 150-180M/bps bursting at mid 200M/bps.
Probably not state of the art stuff but affordable and it will bring my data drives down from 9 (running on different speed conrollers) to 5 all running on a Sata III controller. This should make my case look tidier too. (Stablebit scanner likes them also, so full smart reporting on all my drives at last.)
Then when funds permit, I will invest in a decent Sata III card to future proof expanding data. Although possibly I may be upgrading the Mobo and CPU first.
Then once replaced, I'm wiping the Sammys, doing the firmware then possibly running spinrite on them. Then they're are all going back in the USB 3.0 cases from the Seagates.
As a side note on the occasions that I have reinstalled my server, the initial stage that scans the system and decides what drives are installed and then where to install the O/S etc.. It takes absolutely ages (15 minutes or more). I'm thinking that this may be the cheapo Sata I or Sata II cards installed that are slowing things down. Boot up times are also a good few minutes so I'm hoping that once I can pull the existing cards things will improve. I'm only guessing the sluggishness is hardware related because If I install with ONLY the SSD O/S drive attached its just as bad.
Can an add on card (even if not in use) slow things down so much? If not then It's definitely time to look at upgrading the Mobo.
