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You didn't mention your laptop specs but I'd say if your laptop has USB 3.0+ ports then you should be okay with plugging in a multi-drive USB DAS (like the ones with 2-5 drive bays) or even a single drive USB enclosure if that's your preference. I have a few that I use on and off without issue.
Slower USB speeds are also functional but the performance hit will be noticeable.
some kinda hard drive bay that allows for multiple hard drives to be slotted into and connected (is that a NAS?)?
Although I haven't ever used one, I think you're kind of describing a "DAS" (Direct-attached storage)
I recently ran into the same issue as you and ended up ditching the laptop entirely and installed NixOS onto a TerraMaster NAS.
Don’t get that adapter, get an actual enclosure
Are the read-write speeds sufficient for a server?
Depends.
For most of us, most use-cases, yes. I have 2 externals on USB that are no slower than my ancient NAS that only does 100Mbit Ethernet (honestly they're probably faster).
Now if you're running a transactional database, then externals are bad for throughput, but also stability/reliability and heat.
One thing I rarely see mentioned here is that external drives lack any cooling. This is fine for most uses-cases where people will intermittently copy data to them. But of you try sustained writes you can watch the temps climb in minutes. Which is why both of mine have old, large case fans on them (duct taped in place no less). They're really quiet especially since I run them at 5v instead of 12V.
Externals are generally recommended against of it can be avoided. But of it's what you have, run it, just know the lifespan is likely limited, and they're not to be trusted from stability standpoint - always have redundancy/backups for important data.
My externals are part of my local redundancy - they replicate my main data drive, which is also replicated to my ancient NAS. So I have 3 local copies of everything.
My plex library is served off a pair of usb disks and mounted with mergerfs to appear is a single volume. For home lab stuff you’ll likely be fine what type of services are you running?
Standard USB 3.0 is 5gbps, which is quite a bit faster than a hard disk drive so if you get a basic USB adapter it will perform about as you would expect a hard drive to perform just a bit worse. Direct Attach Storage will be many drives connected over USB and then you might run into limitations as the number of drives increases as USB tends to top out about 350MB/s with drives.
Hey, I started my homeserver adventure with a raspberry pi and external HDD's via USB, which is the same principle of the adapter you're showing. It worked fine for many years.
It should be possible with a SATA to USB converter, if it's USB 3 (see blue part inside USB connector) it's even better. The one on your picture has multiple HDD connectors while you''ll probably only need the SATA one, be sure to check your old HDD connector. Maybe you can find cheaper or find an old external USB hard drive and take it apart and reuse the convertor.
The speeds will probably be more affected by the limits of the HDD, an SSD would be faster I mean. So consider using that storage for files that don't need a fast transfer rate.
I started my Home lab adventure with a pi 4, still have it sure it has gone through many different OS’s and has been used for several different things and worn several different hats but it is still working. I think it has found its forever place in my home lab as a HAOS server with the POE hat booted off of a USB drive.
The only working things in my home lab that are not pi’s are: my printer, my wifi router, and the ISP modem. I have finally got around to ordering another pi 5 to act as my firewall so that modem will be switched to pass through. When I get that setup I will have a pi zero 2 to retire as my wireguard host.
I have 2 pi 5’s running pihole, one of them runs a bunch of other services while the other runs my arr stack and Jellyfin. I have a pi 5 that will host my domains, and hopefully email server(s).
I have plans to get another to replace my AppleTV as the media server in the not to distant future. I had plans to use one to act as an audio amp in my home theatre set up, I may look at that again.
Who knows just for shits and giggles I may find some way to turn a pi into a wifi router with VLANS and a bunch of wifi APs.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| AP | WiFi Access Point |
| ISP | Internet Service Provider |
| NAS | Network-Attached Storage |
| PoE | Power over Ethernet |
| SATA | Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage |
| SSD | Solid State Drive mass storage |
6 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 13 acronyms.
[Thread #310 for this comm, first seen 23rd May 2026, 19:10] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
