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?
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 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.
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.
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.
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 used intel nuc j5005 for 4 years iirc with 2 bay hdd enclosure, Orico brand. Never had any problem that i hear about such as random diaconnecting. Granted i used it to host my media. So i dont pratically mind if the data is gone.
I used openmediavault with usb boot drive. Internal 2.5’ drive as docker appdata. All my media files is stored on the external enclosure. The only problem i noticed is the temperature but thats because of high ambient temp.
If youre planning to use ext enclosure for critical data. Might wanna think twice. But, if you have proper backup plan. Sure why not.
I have the QNAP TL-D800S. It’s an 8 bay DAS but there is also a 4 bay variant. Works well for me. It uses SFF cables to connect to the PC and comes with the appropriate PCIe card which seems more robust to me than anything USB for this.
Yeah this option seems like a more robust option than using an USB one. Unfortunately my mini PC doesn’t offer a sata connection, but thank you for the suggestion!
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.
Yeah a DIY NAS PC sounds like a fun choice, it’s just too bad that this mini PC was a waste of cash if talking about storage. I do have an old PC, but it’s a 3770K which is mighty beast for sure, but definitely a more power hungry device.
I have used mini PCs as a servers for years with file serving being a major duty of them. Granted my storage needs aren’t excessive, but most NUCs or Nuc-likes can hold two drives, some can have a third if you include 2.5" drives. My AsRock A300 can hold 4 drives (two of each), but its m.2 support sucks so that’s not as much of a boon as it sounds. If you need significant storage, there is no replacement for something that can hold 3.5" drives though since those can now reach 20+ GB a drive.
I am currently getting a replacement for my old win10+drivepool setup using hand me down parts from my old main pc. I decided to go with UNRAID this time and other than a few headaches, its been pretty simple to get going. I am already a big fan of the container/docker/app setup. My setup is 3 12tb seagate iron wolf nas drives recertified/refurbished from ebay, the nvme ssd I used as my prior boot drive as a cache drive, and a r7 1700 and ab350m pro 4 mobo with a pny xlr8 1070gpu. It was mostly free since I was replacing it with a newer gaming build. I think I spent $280 on the hdds?
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.
Have you had data loss occurences in these bay enclosures? Some other commenters have said, that using it as a primary storage is really risky because some crappy controllers could ruin the drives’s data for example.
I think the unrecognized issues are because people think it will behave like a device with a controller vs just USB pass-through. Every disk I’ve plugged in just shows up fine on the host. I also have only used it with linux.
As for heat, my drives go to sleep when not in use, but even for long stints of backups it wasn’t an issue.
Thanks for the reply! I have a couple USB 3.0 2-drive docks that just sit out in the open - consolidating in to a single, enclosed unit with a fan would be nice (since mine or open, you really hear the HD spin up/click when accessing it).
What do you use to adjust your drives’ spin down? hdparm? hd-idle? I have one drive that is constantly spinning/accessed so the thermal concerns with the unit do weigh on me.
So see my other comment on the heat above, but smartctl and hdparm both work great with it. For this warm room I’ve stuck a fan in front and temps stay below 40C so far.
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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.
Always have a offside backup for any data you deeply care about it’s never worth he risk.
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
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 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.
Consider the machine being on 24/7 and cooling.
Furthermore, depending on the current power supply, you might need to upgrade it to keep everything running.
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.
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?
I don’t have backups, but I do have a 14TB parity drive in the DAS, using SnapRAID to update it nightly.
The transfer speed of the USB connection is higher than my ethernet speed, so it never bottlenecks me.
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.
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 used intel nuc j5005 for 4 years iirc with 2 bay hdd enclosure, Orico brand. Never had any problem that i hear about such as random diaconnecting. Granted i used it to host my media. So i dont pratically mind if the data is gone.
I used openmediavault with usb boot drive. Internal 2.5’ drive as docker appdata. All my media files is stored on the external enclosure. The only problem i noticed is the temperature but thats because of high ambient temp.
If youre planning to use ext enclosure for critical data. Might wanna think twice. But, if you have proper backup plan. Sure why not.
I have the QNAP TL-D800S. It’s an 8 bay DAS but there is also a 4 bay variant. Works well for me. It uses SFF cables to connect to the PC and comes with the appropriate PCIe card which seems more robust to me than anything USB for this.
Yeah this option seems like a more robust option than using an USB one. Unfortunately my mini PC doesn’t offer a sata connection, but thank you for the suggestion!
It would need a PCIe slot, not a SATA connection. But I assume it doesn’t have that either then.
Do you think that PCIe card would fit on a lenovo 1L PC? Those have a PCIe slot, but only small cards fit.
Are you talking about these? They don’t look like they have a PCIe slot…
In any case, the specifications say
Yes, many of them have a PCIe slot, example. Thanks for the specifications
I use the usb version of the qnap 4 bay and never had an issue. Into a nuc holding all media. Boot and docker config all on the nuc nvme.
Doing it now with a not so mini second hand pc
Did that for 3 years. Not pretty but it worked
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?
DAS enclosures can do a great job of cooling by separating and not sharing the air inside a single case.
Yeah a DIY NAS PC sounds like a fun choice, it’s just too bad that this mini PC was a waste of cash if talking about storage. I do have an old PC, but it’s a 3770K which is mighty beast for sure, but definitely a more power hungry device.
I have used mini PCs as a servers for years with file serving being a major duty of them. Granted my storage needs aren’t excessive, but most NUCs or Nuc-likes can hold two drives, some can have a third if you include 2.5" drives. My AsRock A300 can hold 4 drives (two of each), but its m.2 support sucks so that’s not as much of a boon as it sounds. If you need significant storage, there is no replacement for something that can hold 3.5" drives though since those can now reach 20+ GB a drive.
I am currently getting a replacement for my old win10+drivepool setup using hand me down parts from my old main pc. I decided to go with UNRAID this time and other than a few headaches, its been pretty simple to get going. I am already a big fan of the container/docker/app setup. My setup is 3 12tb seagate iron wolf nas drives recertified/refurbished from ebay, the nvme ssd I used as my prior boot drive as a cache drive, and a r7 1700 and ab350m pro 4 mobo with a pny xlr8 1070gpu. It was mostly free since I was replacing it with a newer gaming build. I think I spent $280 on the hdds?
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.
Have you had data loss occurences in these bay enclosures? Some other commenters have said, that using it as a primary storage is really risky because some crappy controllers could ruin the drives’s data for example.
Yes there is someone talking everybody down about USB enclosures*.
Maybe he got burned or something…
Can say never had an issue and I replaced many motherboards over 20 years, and also many enclosures.
Don’t go too cheap, but don’t worry too much. I highly recommend a raid setup anyway. And always do backups, bit this is unrelated to USB specifically
I have not, but I also run it as a RAIDZ, so if I did have issues with one, the parity should cover it. That being said it is a backup for me.
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?
To follow up on this, I just used it in a 72F room, and the drives hit 60C. So heat is an issue, I’ve just never run into it before.
None.
I think the unrecognized issues are because people think it will behave like a device with a controller vs just USB pass-through. Every disk I’ve plugged in just shows up fine on the host. I also have only used it with linux.
As for heat, my drives go to sleep when not in use, but even for long stints of backups it wasn’t an issue.
Reviews for just the 4-bay: https://www.amazon.com/product-reviews/B078YQHWYW/ref=cm_cr_arp_mb_viewopt_smt?formatType=current_format&pageNumber=1
Thanks for the reply! I have a couple USB 3.0 2-drive docks that just sit out in the open - consolidating in to a single, enclosed unit with a fan would be nice (since mine or open, you really hear the HD spin up/click when accessing it).
What do you use to adjust your drives’ spin down? hdparm? hd-idle? I have one drive that is constantly spinning/accessed so the thermal concerns with the unit do weigh on me.
Oh man it’s been a while, but I think I used hdparm. They basically show up as individual USB drives and were SMART capable.
The DAS is disconnected now for a road test (this system will eventually live in a van), but once I reconnect it I could check if you would like.
If it crosses your mind once it’s all hooked up :-)
So see my other comment on the heat above, but
smartctlandhdparmboth work great with it. For this warm room I’ve stuck a fan in front and temps stay below 40C so far.