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?
I used USB enclosures for my RAIDs for over 20 years. The turning point has been usb3 and then usb-c even better, but I found really no difference as in the bottleneck where the mechanical drives.
Moved to an all internal sata setup a few months back because I upgraded the space and moved to a desktop form factor.
Can still recommend the USB approach tough.
BUY A QUALITY EBCLOSURE.
I always used Linux software raid, but purchased a 4 slots USB raid/jbod enclosure to keep the number of used USB ports down.
I never ever had issues with the setup, but I purchased a known-brand enclosure, one with also e-SATA, which unfortunately was/is more a fad than even been really used.
Doing it now with a not so mini second hand pc
Did that for 3 years. Not pretty but it worked
There are small SATA backplanes that allow you to fit 3 HDDs into two 5.25" slots (or 4 HDDs in 3 slots). You can find used ones for cheap (mine was 30€), and with some cheap tower case you could get something NAS-like with hot-swap drive bays for way cheaper
I use a couple of mini pcs in exactly the setup you are talking about. Only downside is throughput. Anything built in is gonna be faster for read write ops, but usb3 is plenty fast for most things including media and data sync. I run Ubuntu with ZFS, and created raid arrays for data redundancy. It works really well. I virtualize using Incus with docker inside of those tiny VMs. It’s awesome.
