Oh that definitely seem possible but I would assume going with a trusted seller with a warranty like goharddrive and serverpartdeal must be a safer choice in this regard.

Hungary, but these prices seem to be one of the best I was able to find currently.

I don’t have any experience with win 11, but all I can tell you is that my dual booted win 10 iot ltsc 2021 edition just werks for me, same as any other windows, although I only use it for some VR games currently or some software that doesn’t support Linux.

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.

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.

And what’s your experience with it? Is the data transfer speed fast enough for you? Where do you do backups?

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!

Wow thank you for these links, you’re insane. And if you would start this homelab process again, then would you go with this mini PC + DAS layout again, or with desktop pc as a NAS?

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

Sounds like a good idea, since according to the comments it seems I really shouldn’t be using DAS as a primary storage (not with USB specifically).

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!