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?
You may not be able to do RAID or other redundant/performant arrays with USB. You can definitely achieve a big JBOD array but it will be less resilient and slower than a RAID array. Enclosures often don’t cool as well so heat may degrade your disks faster as well. I did this for a while with some old disks and some $30 HDD toasters. I only put data on there I could afford to lose. I wish there was a standalone hardware RAID solution… like a NAS without the network. That would have a huge draw for hobbyists that don’t want to buy an expensive NAS. I’ve searched for this but haven’t found anything. Message me if you know of such a product! Maybe consider building your own NAS with an old PC. Way cheaper than a prebuilt and fun to build! I had an old Dell Optiplex 990 that is now a 32 TB NAS. Had to get a new case but it’s a decent backup to my Synology.
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.
This is completely untrue.
You can get plently of performant arrays over USB. You do know how much USB 3.1 or 4 can transmit?
Enclosures often don’t cool as well so heat may degrade your disks faster as well.
DAS enclosures can do a great job of cooling by separating and not sharing the air inside a single case.
If you use a reputable brand, such as TerraMaster you’ll avoid all of the scare stories you hear.
Almost everything bad seems to be along the lines of
I bought “off brand” XzzYyG from Amazon/EBay/Wish and it failed
Something like this:
https://www.terra-master.com/uk/products/homesoho-das/d6-320.html
It’ll be faster than your spinning rust anyway, as long as you have high speed ports on your mini PC.
I was very intrigued until they wanted my email before showing me the “Quick Installation Guide”.
Err, you mean the piece of paper that came in the box, or is available to download on their website as a link without having to register?
https://www.terra-master.com/us/d6-320.html?page=menu&mid=1336
I followed the support link in their menu, clicked on quick guide and got this page: https://support.terra-master.com/quickguide/
Are you not presented with a form forcing you to enter an email?
I just did a websearch and first result was a download link on their US website too which didn’t require registration.
There seems to be a lot of nonsense on here.
such as TerraMaster
The reputable brand that quietly updated my device in the middle of the night and reset my password to a randomly generated one, locking me out of the device? That brand? The brand that runs their OS off of a USB stick inside the device so it’s always a ticking time bomb that might just stop working randomly? That one?
Get old HP thinclient T510, or Igel M340C. Got a few of those practically free online. Has Via Eden 1.2Ghz 2 core. Not powerful at all. But cold. Mine runs on hot summer days approximately between 40-50C. HP has I think 19V power source, Igel runs on 12V brick.
It’s viable, but when you’re buying a DAS for the drives, figure out what the USB chipset is and make sure it’s not a flaky piece of crap.
Things have gotten better, but some random manufacturers are still using trash bridge chips and you’ll be in for a bad time. (By which I mean your drives will vanish in the middle of a write, and corrupt themselves.)
Seconded. It’s not a bad idea, but it’s another point of failure for sure.
To add on - several of those USB controllers implement stuff in non-standard ways, so if your board fails you either need another one of the exact same model and firmware to read the data off those drives again. It’s very likely if you just bought another DAS/USB controller that the drives/partitions would be unreadable, and you’d have to start over again.
OP, it’s not a bad idea unless you don’t have a backup plan. If you are planning on having no backups, then this is much more risky than just an external hard drive, this could very well lead to complete data loss. If you have a solid backup plan, then go for it! If you don’t, then for the love of god you aren’t ready for it.
Honestly, if you only need a few bays, just look at getting a Synology.
So as a TLDR a DAS really should only be used as an offside backup plan or secondary storage then? I might really have to do a DIY NAS with a desktop PC then. Thank you for the warning!
I mean it’s up to you, your decision. In my experience going the usb route though only leads to more cost later, to me it’s better to just save your money and go with a solid solution in a couple of months. You don’t have to go crazy. An old desktop with some extra sata ports is a fine start
I’ve had “trash controllers” in Orico units which rewite the drive details which makes them annoying to work with but I’ve never heard of
your drives will vanish in the middle of a write, and corrupt themselves
That sounds likes its underpowered and when the draw is up the supply can’t handle it, which could happen for internal drives if your supply isn’t up to powering enough drives.
Use a reputable brand like TerraMaster and you’ll not have those sorts of problems.
I use an M1 Mac Mini running Asahi Linux with a USB 3.0 4-bay enclosure. Works great so far.
And what’s your experience with it? Is the data transfer speed fast enough for you? Where do you do backups?
