I usually just yolo and throw them into the pool but my last drive I just did a long SMART test and it came up clean so into the pool it went.

One can also do a badblocks run if you don’t mind waiting the extra time to do so and can understand the logs.

Mmm, sure but it can be a bitch to get booting again if you don’t know what you’re doing and sometimes when you do. Lol

I’d do it with gparted and if you’re using uefi then you need to grab that partition too and that’s where may run into a problem that requires you to know how to work with on your particular system bios.

Typical cloning tools will just wipe what’s there, gparted let’s you copy individual partitions and paste them on another disk. Not a lot of people know that. :)

Available on just about every Linux iso, can easily be installed if it isn’t, and has its own iso of you need something dedicated.

Network interface card.

10 gig or more?

So a nas with tons of storage, high speed nic to a desktop, and a dock to attach the old drives for review. From there, it’s just a matter of sorting through files and dumping them on the nas. Personally, I’d do it with a Linux PC to avoid pesky windows permissions.

you can host on a raspberry pi.

the question shouldn’t be can you host, it should be about what you want to host. there’s tons of things one can host. see the links in the sidebar of this sub’s feed page.

That’s a spare PC? I’m jelly.

You can fit lots of stuff in 4gb of ram. Just pile on services till it starts running low.