Might be a good thing to mention that while I am a technical guy, I haven't really dug into details of drive/space management and the sorts. Let's say I just dipped my toes into this subject a few times, as such apologies if I speak stupid or this whole idea is just bad.
I can't seem to find anything on this idea because all topics are about data recovery and such. But maybe I'm not using the right keywords.
Anyway, getting to it: failed HDDs and SSDs are starting to pile up over here so I'm thinking about how I could put them to some good use. Obviously am talking about the ones with bad sectors, not the ones that fail to be recognized by the BIOS (I've got a couple of those too).
For example, I'm using one such 500GB SSD in my zgemma H7 box (tv recordings) and whenever a recording is made that's unreadable (hasn't happened in a while) I just rename it to "bad-something" and move it to a dedicated folder never to be deleted again. Not the best solution given that just small bits of the recordings are bad, but it's easy for me to do and doesn't require any other tweaks.
But in the past 6 months I had 2 500GB+ SSDs and 1 6TB HDD fail (this one is still in ddrescue with status " time since last successful read: 42.7 d" so I'd say it's kind of done recovering whatever can be read) which has a 204 MB worth of bad sectors, all of them nicely tucked together around the "middle" of the drive, so I'm thinking something mechanical has had to happen at some point that caused this, making this a good candidate to be used since it does give me almost 6TB of space to work with, split in an almost equal "2 good partitions".
So far the failed SSDs have bad sectors all over the place.
Anyway, since I've got like almost 6 drives now laying around doing nothing (closing in to 10 TB) I am thinking if there is some "smart" solution (software or hardware) that I would be able to setup in a way to create some NAS solution across a diverse type and sizes of drives.
I seem to recall reading at some point somewhere about some raid card that allows sticking in different sizes of drives and creating 1 raid volume of them all; it stuck in my head because it seemed like an interesting thing but did not save it (or did, but can't find it). Maybe someone has better experience with these cards to point me in a right direction. I have 1 raid card in one of my esxi rigs but I'd hate to bring that down just so I poke around with the card.
Long story short, if my idea is bad, does anyone have a better one? Hardware and/or software, I'm open to anything.
And might be important to mention, I am running a home lab of 2 VMWare ESXi rigs right now (the first one is from the dawn of times), and in the next year the 3rd to come. So there are currently quite a few HDDs and SSDs in them and some are reaching their EOL so I am expecting them to start failing, just as these 3 did in the past months. That being said, I'm foreseeing a lot of SSDs and HDDs coming and going, so this "re-use" solution is a long term one, so worth investing a bit into it.
My likely target is to store archived stuff on this potential NAS and 2nd/3rd+ copy backups, having some sort of solution to regularly check data consistency.
Thanks
