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.
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.
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.