Thought this might be helpful as a lot of these mini PCs are hitting the used market.
The thing is, I don’t know what “well known brands” are in that space. It’s not something I buy frequently.
IME, they’re all the same chipset/set of chipsets and are all pretty awful.
That said, the most reliable ones I’ve found actually come from drives that have been shucked. Western Digital or whomever aren’t going to do the absolute lowest price piece of shit enclosure for something they’re going to warranty for 3 or 5 years, so those have been what I try to find and have had reasonable luck with them in terms of reliability and not-catching-shit-on-fire.
Usually cheap as shit on eBay or whatever, since they’re basically the packaging trash around something that was purchased for the gooey insides.
I’m more interested in multi-bay enclosures, but as you said, the chipsets tend to be kinda crappy. And that’s what makes me hesitate to use these mini PCs, my use-case is for a NAS, but these enclosures are kind of expensive and seem to have pretty poor components.
So for now, I’m using larger cases to hold the drives. But it takes up a lot of desk space, so these mini PCs are very attractive, if I can get a compact external enclosure to work.
Yeah, I’ve never seen a multi-bay enclosure that doesn’t just randomly decide it’s done with this bullshit and have random dropouts or just plain fucking off entirely.
I don’t know WHY they’re so bad, but they are :/
I just converted part of a closet to a network closet and added some shelves and stuffed everything in there, though I know that’s not an option everyone has.
Then just go with the warranty. Good brands are obviously well known: Cooler Master, Corsair, TerraMaster, Orico, ASUS…etc.
TerraMaster, Orico
I honestly have never used either of these, yet they show up at a lot of retailers.
ASUS is a bit sketchy these days IMO, so I try to avoid them.
