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These days you can buy 4 bay USB-C hard drive enclosures which let you make a nas out of any mini pc. I 3D printed a 10 inch rack to put the mini pc, hard drive

These days you can buy 4 bay USB-C hard drive enclosures which let you make a nas out of any mini pc. I 3D printed a 10 inch rack to put the mini pc, hard drive enclosure and switch in which keeps it all neat and looks kinda cool.

magarnicle 8d ago
I do a similar thing. It really is functionally exactly the same, just a bit more piecemeal.
drnick1 8d ago
Why not an old school case with an HDD cage that can hold anywhere between a few and a dozen drives? It would be cheaper and more flexible.
- rkagerer 7d ago
  Or even go nuts and do something like this: https://grabcad.com/library/10-bay-hard-disk-drive-cage-for-phanteks-enthoo-primo-case-1 https://grabcad.com/library/10-bay-hard-disk-drive-cage-for-...
M95D 7d ago
USB is unreliable. I used btrfs raid0 on USB drives for more than a year. Every month or so, a drive would disconnect from the bus and immediately redetected as another device (sde->sdf). Btrfs does not auto-recover from this. The choices are 1) reboot and scrub, which recovers the missing drive without doing a full resync, but it needs a reboot (any hosted site is offline for 3 minutes) and scrub takes a long time reading in the background, or 2) run btrfs replace which doesn't need a reboot, but the full resync takes even longer than a scrub and increases wear if it's a ssd because it wipes everything and writes all data again.
- dsr_ 7d ago
  I agree that USB is unreliable. I will point out that if you use ZFS instead of btrfs, you can specify drives to be detected via their serial number names rather than their attachment points, so a reconnect will not require a reboot. Still, don't depend on USB for anything meant to be permanently connected.
  - doubled112 7d ago
    USB is unreliable but it's working for me. I've had zero disconnects in a couple of years of using a Terramaster USB-C DAS. I've heard of the problems enough I've even searched logs for it. I've wondered if my experience is different because I'm using single disks (but still ZFS) instead of any RAID. There is rarely transfer happening across all of the disks.

magarnicle 8d ago

I do a similar thing. It really is functionally exactly the same, just a bit more piecemeal.

drnick1 8d ago

Why not an old school case with an HDD cage that can hold anywhere between a few and a dozen drives? It would be cheaper and more flexible.

rkagerer 7d ago
Or even go nuts and do something like this: https://grabcad.com/library/10-bay-hard-disk-drive-cage-for-phanteks-enthoo-primo-case-1 https://grabcad.com/library/10-bay-hard-disk-drive-cage-for-...

M95D 7d ago

USB is unreliable. I used btrfs raid0 on USB drives for more than a year. Every month or so, a drive would disconnect from the bus and immediately redetected as another device (sde->sdf). Btrfs does not auto-recover from this. The choices are 1) reboot and scrub, which recovers the missing drive without doing a full resync, but it needs a reboot (any hosted site is offline for 3 minutes) and scrub takes a long time reading in the background, or 2) run btrfs replace which doesn't need a reboot, but the full resync takes even longer than a scrub and increases wear if it's a ssd because it wipes everything and writes all data again.

dsr_ 7d ago
I agree that USB is unreliable. I will point out that if you use ZFS instead of btrfs, you can specify drives to be detected via their serial number names rather than their attachment points, so a reconnect will not require a reboot. Still, don't depend on USB for anything meant to be permanently connected.
- doubled112 7d ago
  USB is unreliable but it's working for me. I've had zero disconnects in a couple of years of using a Terramaster USB-C DAS. I've heard of the problems enough I've even searched logs for it. I've wondered if my experience is different because I'm using single disks (but still ZFS) instead of any RAID. There is rarely transfer happening across all of the disks.