Thanks to this community I’ve learned and I’m feeling inspired. I’ve loved having an NAS for the last few years, but it’s woefully under powered for what I’m using it for these days.
So I’ve ordered some basic PC parts, gonna build a basic setup using an old CPU I got lying about and try the NAS OS I saw talked about on here recently.
TrueNAS looks like a good option with only slight fears it’ll go down the well known path to the dark side like so many free options before.
In any event, I’m looking forward to adding Nextcloud and Jellyfin, to trying out Docker and generally having more control over things.
Thanks again to you all for informing and inspiring.
I’ll be back if I get questions!
Drive bay I’m using is a Sabrent DS-SC4B, connected via USB3. I’m currently collecting parts for an actual tower build based on a G4560T.
Interesting! I am assuming each drive shows up as an independent drive that you can raid up however you want in software? Man I was looking for something like this, but at the time I was building my NAS, I couldn’t find something similar so I just decided to build a whole new machine with enough space to contain the drives themselves. Had I known, I might have gone with this and a NUC or something. How’s the performance?
Yeah, each drive is shown as if they were individually attached the machine. RAID how you want (or don’t). I’ve got three 4TB drives in an 8TB RAID5, one 4TB that contains data from my gaming PC that I’m working on moving to the RAID, and then a separate 8TB external drive that everything on the RAID array is rsynced to for backup (not ideal but it’s something).
I’m actually going the other way and building a proper server out of an ancient HP Proliant ML110 G2 that my dad gave me. Shockingly, it’s fully ATX compatible and has 8+ drive bays. I’m just reusing the case though and stuffing it with more modern components; it was originally equipped with a Pentium 4 😂 I’m not a fan of the single USB connection for all that data.
Sufficient I suppose. Limited by the single USB 3 connection. The Mac mini isn’t stressed at all, but the RJ45 connector has some fucky Apple weirdness about it that causes it to go to sleep periodically. There’s a workaround for it that I applied a while ago, but it still drops out occasionally. But, that’s an Apple-specific problem, not the enclosure. The enclosure works fine.
Haha, one of my top concerns at the beginning was form factor. I really could not find a decent 4-bay case at the time that wasn’t super hard to build in or a full-blown ATX. I think the closest I found was a Jonsbo N2, but it doesn’t give enough space for a decent cooler. What I ended up going with was total overkill, a NZXT H1 with a PCI-E NVMe expansion card that gave me 3 extra NVMe slots. So now I have a RAIDZ1 array made up 4x 4TB SSDs. The overall form factor is nice, but the performance is completely ridiculously overspecced. My rationale though is that the SSDs were cheap enough and I think they’ll outlast a regular HDD. I was annoyed at how my WD Reds died within 3-4 years back when I was still using my QNAP.
Now that locally hosting AI models is becoming a thing, I am kinda regretting going small form factor because I can’t cram GPUs in there. So now I am thinking maybe getting one of those 4-foot high small server cabinets and getting a few Sliger CX4170a’s and just building full PCs. I would probably move my main PC into that rack as well. But this is all just thoughts. Budget wise it’s a bit ridiculous, but one can dream!
Dang, if they made an updated one with USB 4, that’d be sick. Heck, I wouldn’t even mind if they had multiple USB connections coming out of the thing, I just like the form factor.