Hi,

My company almost no longer emits CO2 in its daily travel.
I have returned my car's license plates and more than 95% of my trips are by bike or on foot.
I am proud of this, but this is quite of a challenge when having to deal with large capacity (≥ 4TB) 3.5" hard drives on site.

Practical case example:

• 2x 4TB SAS 3.5" WD with 512K sectors
• Since SAS cards often do not support all models of hard drives, bringing the SAS HDD at the office is not always an option.
• Moving the whole server is difficult without a car.
• 3.5" hard drives + docks + laptops are bulky and heavy in the backpack when travelling by bike. Slighly easier with a trolley but public transports are slow, so that using a trolley is mostly an option for very local customers that I can reach by foot.
• 2.5" hard drives are typically AF. Cloning 512 to 4K should not be a problem but I prefer cloning to an image. Hence a 5TB 2.5" destination drive is required for a 4TB source (especially for WD drives that have a slighly higher number of sectors than other the ones of other brands).

Using large capacity SSD could offer the benefit of weight and having sectors of 512 bytes, but they are still quite expensive and will depreciate very quickly.

I am looking for alternatives like a JBOD 2.5" USB enclosure.

I also don't understand why manufacturers do not produce some low cost high capacity 3.5" SSD (e.g. 4TB) using older generation NAND chips.

I don't want having to use a trailer nor a cargo bike.
Bicycle bags could be an option, but woud appreciate if I can avoid them thanks to some compact and lightweight equipement.

Thank you for your suggestions !

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Data recovery in Geneva (Switzerland)
https://www.sosdonnees.ch/en

USB-C 2.5" SATA enclosures are widely available

USB-C NVMe enclosures are now more widely available.

Make copies of important data

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Orico DS500C3-US-BK 5-disk 3.5" SATA, iTGZ 4x M.2 2280 Thunderbolt enclosure NVMe/SATA, etc. etc.

Maybe use VHD or VHDX, it will increase the size only if the source has data.