I was thinking on buying a 2-4 bay HDD powered enclosure as a NAS for my mini pc, since I already have that, and buying or building a full-fledged diy NAS seems a bit expensive.
I want to hear some opinions from you guys, since it seems using this method is a mixed area from the selfhosted pros. I would be hoping that by using a powered enclosure, that would alleviate or solve the USB port overcharging issue, which have appeared in my mini pc when trying out an external HDD with a normal sata to usb converter.
Did you have any experiences with a setup like this one?
That’s why you should always use them as jbod and setup Linux software raid (or zfs raid? Not familiar) directly.
Never go without a raid… Not a good idea in any case.
As for heat, I used jbod enclosures with fan, anything with more than 2 drives should have one, or don’t bother.
I wouldn’t go with single drive enclosures (even if I did for 10 years) as better not to cheap out on this matter. A 4 x 10€ cheap enclosure might be tempting, but shilling out 100€ for a nice actively cooled 4-disk jbod is a much better choice. Then go sw raid on top of it.
