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
I mean, unlimited, personal backup on Backblaze is $99 USD per year. The only downside is restoring large, multi-tb backups. The way they get around that is ‘Restore by Mail’. You ‘rent’ a 10 tb drive(s) from them with your files and have it shipped to you. When you have transferred your data, you can return the drive for a full refund. Also, temporary storage is not backed up like CDs, etc. You have to physically transfer that to an internal HDD / SDD.
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/introducing-the-restore-return-refund-program/
I think Deep Glacier is cheaper if you’re backing up less than 8 TB, so I think I may have to go with Backblaze if I end up using up all 12 TB. Really depends.
Just throwing it out there mate. I’m sure there may be others. I just have had a decent amount of time with them, and so far I have had no issues. However, I will say that one man’s solution is another man’s plague.