this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2024
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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?

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 days ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 days ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

And what kinda mobo have you went with? A microATX perhaps?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

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.