Get a USB-C DAS (enclosure) for your disks, those use their own power supply. Since it is USB-C performance will be very good and stable and you'll be happy with it.
this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2024
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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.
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.
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Yes, and you might want to ask in the datahoarders community.
While I dont use a mini-pc, I have a server with 48TB in it on spinning disks, and I've built a hybrid DAS/NAS that I back up to.
I use this 4-bay DAS: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B078YQHWYW I chose it because it supports USB 3.2 Gen 2 and I've been pretty happy with it.
It's usually plugged into my server directly, and I use ZFS to snapshot and send to it. However, I also can plug it into a Pi5 and use ZFS send over SSH to treat it like a NAS. The Pi can of course run Samba/CIFS and SSH for sshfs.
The biggest downside to this structure is probably the metadata speeds for ZFS over USB (looking up snapshot names), but you could always use a cache drive with ZFS.
I highly, highly recommend ZFS and figuring out your software requirements before picking hardware.
Happy to answer any specific questions, too.
Reviews on that page are kind of dodgy, but they are for all 3 products listed which makes it difficult to tell which review is for what.
Have you had any of the listed issues? Heat, unrecognized success, etc?
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