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 built my own and it honestly wasn’t that expensive (at the time back in 2018). I just started with the basics but built it to be expandable. I used a Define 6 case which gave me room for 12 HDDs, a mobo with the highest number of SATA ports, processor, RAM, etc and then just added drives 1-2 at a time as they filled up. My only regret is that I didn’t and still haven’t learned Linux well enough to rely on it because it runs Windows, the PC is showing its age now, and I need to think about the replacement solution and how I’ll be able to migrate 70+ TB of media and all my configurations to the new machine.
If you do run Windows, Drivepool and SnapRAID are useful for pooling everything into a single virtual disk and setting up a software RAID that will protect from drive failures without locking your data away.
And what kinda mobo have you went with? A microATX perhaps?
It’s a midtower case so I just went with an ATX board. I would like to figure out a compact solution for the future but it’s hard to house and control a bunch of HDDs in a small footprint. I don’t want to spend thousands on a NAS and I haven’t found a trustworthy DAS solution that will hold all my drives.
You might play around with PCPartPicker since it allows for so many filtering options for things like SATA ports on a mobo or drive slots in a case and see what you can come up with.
You can also use snapraid (and mergefs) on Linux to do the same thing! I’m excited to recognize this because I recently turned an old PC into a crappy nas with Open Media Vault and used these two.