I’ve found an Inspiron with an FX8800P and 1 3.5” slot and a DVD slot. I intend to use it in my 3-2-1 backup with two drives (one hot, one warm) and the third backup in AWS Glacier (inb4 fuck Amazon - it’s cheap). It will also function as a NAS.
Have you placed a 3.5” drive in the 5.25” DVD bay? I understand you may need an adapter. Not sure if I can skip that.
The reason I can’t use a consumer NAS is because I want to power one of the drives off for power, longevity, and I don’t want to use RAID (also they’re quite $$$).
Edit:
Doesn’t look like a dock is necessary…
Yeah so the answer is no
The DVD drive should have a SATA connector already.
OP you can do this, I 3D printed a couple adapters to fit 3.5" drives into my old server case’s 5.25" slots while migrating everything to a new server. My only real concern with the whole thing is that there’s no rubber isolators on them which could cause issues longterm.
The number of times I’ve ran a system with a hard drive just sitting on the floor of the computer without issues…
the number of years i’ve run usb->sata adapters and had (up to a dozen or so) bare drives laying around and propped up anywhere i could find a spot…
…hanging from their cables…
I wouldn’t stress about it. People are overly delicate with their hard drives in my experience. They’re surprisingly sturdy and failure tends to be pretty random. There might be a slight statistical correlation in failure rates with minor vibration, but anecdotally I’ve got drives that vibrate the hell out of themselves (probably due to some other manufacturing defect) and have lasted decades with no errors, and plenty that fail completely for no perceptible reason at all. Spinning disks are just inherently unreliable, not that any storage technology is perfectly reliable. This is why backups are never optional.