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Low Cost Mini PCs
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this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2024
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Anyone have experience with external HDD enclosures? I currently have two 3.5" HDDs, and I'd like room for two or three more. Reliability is pretty important to me, so something that'll cut out periodically isn't going to work.
I'm in the same situation as you, more or less... I have three new 22TB drives that need an enclosure, preferably for JBOD (no hardware RAID needed) but I can't figure out which ones are actually good products... I don't mind using a random-brand product if it's actually solid.
I find it very difficult to figure out which ones will support my 22TB drives. And for some of them, it seems, it's impossible to add new drives to empty slots later (because of hardware RAID, I guess?), which has made me hesitant in buying one with more slots than I have drives, in case they can't be utilized later on anyway...
I was looking at the QNAP TR-004 which was mentioned by someone else somewhere on Lemmy some months ago, but IIRC it would be impossible to use the fourth slot later if the drive isn't included in the hardware RAID configuration...
EDIT: I have also been looking into so-called "backplanes" as an alternative, since they seem to do the job and are cheaper, but I'm unsure if I'll need a PC chassis/case/tower for that to actually work?
If you find something good (products or relevant info), feel free to share it with me.
I've run a TR-004 for the last 5 years haven't had any reliability issues so far. In hardware raid modes, drives are hot swappable but you can't grow the array without wiping it. I'm JBOD mode you need to power off before swapping drives. The main problem I've had is their chipset is only partially supported by smartmontools due to proprietary crap so there is some strange behaviour there.
Thanks for your response. Much appreciated. Do I understand it correctly that I'll be able to add more drives later in JBOD mode, but I'll simply have to power it off before adding or swapping drives?
That's right.
Yeah, I don't understand why JBOD with a decent chipset is so hard to find. I really don't expect much from it, I just want to slide some drives in and have everything run consistently for a few months at a time. I'll power cycle periodically to apply updates, so I'm not looking for 24/7/365 operation or anything.
FWIW, Level1Techs seems to recommend MediaSonic (timestamp is where he talks about reliability), but doesn't give it a ringing endorsement. And that was one of the better ones he's seen...
After a bunch of research, what I've found is:
Now I'm looking for compact cases that support 5 drives, like this one (a little too cheap perhaps?) or this one. It just seems reliable 4-5 bay USB-C enclosures just aren't that popular.
For usb, make sure to get one with UASP https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/uasp-makes-raspberry-pi-4-disk-io-50-faster
Makes sense for single drives, but if I go with USB, it'll be something like this with multiple bays, which will almost certainly support UASP. I also don't want a hardware RAID controller because I'd much rather my BTRFS filesystem handle the individual drives than rely on some controller to not corrupt my data.
The problem, however, is that a lot of these enclosures use really crappy components. Sometimes drives will drop off for no reason and the entire unit will need to be power cycled. They also tend to require a separate power supply, which is also annoying. But if there's a super high quality one for pretty cheap, the entire package (mini PC + enclosure) is probably smaller than pretty much any equivalent case. So I'm interested, I just haven't found a good fit.
Just go with a well known brand with a warranty.
The thing is, I don't know what "well known brands" are in that space. It's not something I buy frequently.
Then just go with the warranty. Good brands are obviously well known: Cooler Master, Corsair, TerraMaster, Orico, ASUS...etc.
I honestly have never used either of these, yet they show up at a lot of retailers.
ASUS is a bit sketchy these days IMO, so I try to avoid them.
Well, if you have your preference, go with it. The base thing is to stick with a company with a solid reputation that was a warranty and isn't disappearing overnight.
IME, they're all the same chipset/set of chipsets and are all pretty awful.
That said, the most reliable ones I've found actually come from drives that have been shucked. Western Digital or whomever aren't going to do the absolute lowest price piece of shit enclosure for something they're going to warranty for 3 or 5 years, so those have been what I try to find and have had reasonable luck with them in terms of reliability and not-catching-shit-on-fire.
Usually cheap as shit on eBay or whatever, since they're basically the packaging trash around something that was purchased for the gooey insides.
I'm more interested in multi-bay enclosures, but as you said, the chipsets tend to be kinda crappy. And that's what makes me hesitate to use these mini PCs, my use-case is for a NAS, but these enclosures are kind of expensive and seem to have pretty poor components.
So for now, I'm using larger cases to hold the drives. But it takes up a lot of desk space, so these mini PCs are very attractive, if I can get a compact external enclosure to work.
Yeah, I've never seen a multi-bay enclosure that doesn't just randomly decide it's done with this bullshit and have random dropouts or just plain fucking off entirely.
I don't know WHY they're so bad, but they are :/
I just converted part of a closet to a network closet and added some shelves and stuffed everything in there, though I know that's not an option everyone has.
Yeah, I'd need to run cable if I moved my machines to a closet, and I'm putting that off. I do plan to do that though, so maybe someday. :)
Yeah I ran ethernet everywhere when I bought my house and it's fantastic. Multi-gig everywhere!
I'm also never fucking doing that again because the builder of my house must have gotten a fantastic fucking deal 120 years ago on 2x4s, because they decided to do a narrow cross-bracing between studs on every damn wall, so I had fucking rock-hard old growth 2x4s to drill through every 14 inches or so in every damn wall I was running cables on.
Killed several hundred dollars in drill bits and other tools (broke a few fish tapes!) getting this shit done, AND it took like a month to get finished and then the walls patched where I had to cut into it to see what in the fuck the drill was hitting.
But yeah, ethernet everywhere is great!
Yeah, that's what I'm worried about. Fortunately, the previous owner seemed obsessed with phone and coax jacks, so almost every room has at least one of them. I could just run ethernet over those jacks, but I might be able to attach a string to them to pull in a proper ethernet cable. Then again, maybe I'll just end up needing to drill new holes, idk.
I'm just not looking forward to doing it is all.
Make sure you come back and update me when you try it, and then find out that the cables are all stapled to the studs.
That's always extra fun to discover once you start running cabling.
Though, if you have good coax everywhere, MOCA is a legitimate option you should be considering, as it'll do gigabit (more than, even) and the adapters aren't particularly expensive compared to dealing with having to pull cabling through everywhere.
Good point, I'll consider MOCA. The main problem is that we have three sets (OTA antenna, satellite, and internet), and I'm not sure which are which, but figuring that out should be quite a bit easier than running cable. :)
I'm not planning on getting anything more than gigabit in the near future, though my city is rolling out fiber and claims to support up to 10gbit.