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.
What's stopping you? Lol
It's not a problem dude. XD
last time I installed steam it was from the repos. I use nothing but ubuntu spins. only thing extra was I needed the 32bit opengl libs for nvidia.
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.
Just use ext4 like a proper Linux gamer. Lol
NTFS is a pain to deal with and fat32 isn't supported for games.
it'd probably be easier to mount the drive at a consistent location. the user level automounting thing puts the drive in a special user folder under /media. it may help if the game folder is owned by the user running lutris, not just the group.
a small x86 box with a couple nics and opnsense would work far better.
Time before failure is impossible to predict but these days, they'll last far longer than you'll likely use it for.
only mods I play with are steam workshop stuff and I only have one game that uses it, Space Engineers. I wish more did and not rely on some extra launcher.