this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2024
25 points (96.3% liked)

Selfhosted

40645 readers
271 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 2 points 16 hours ago (2 children)

Yes, and you might want to ask in the datahoarders community.

While I dont use a mini-pc, I have a server with 48TB in it on spinning disks, and I've built a hybrid DAS/NAS that I back up to.

I use this 4-bay DAS: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B078YQHWYW I chose it because it supports USB 3.2 Gen 2 and I've been pretty happy with it.

It's usually plugged into my server directly, and I use ZFS to snapshot and send to it. However, I also can plug it into a Pi5 and use ZFS send over SSH to treat it like a NAS. The Pi can of course run Samba/CIFS and SSH for sshfs.

The biggest downside to this structure is probably the metadata speeds for ZFS over USB (looking up snapshot names), but you could always use a cache drive with ZFS.

I highly, highly recommend ZFS and figuring out your software requirements before picking hardware.

Happy to answer any specific questions, too.

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

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 hours ago

I have not, but I also run it as a RAIDZ, so if I did have issues with one, the parity should cover it. That being said it is a backup for me.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

Reviews on that page are kind of dodgy, but they are for all 3 products listed which makes it difficult to tell which review is for what.

Have you had any of the listed issues? Heat, unrecognized success, etc?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) (1 children)

None.

I think the unrecognized issues are because people think it will behave like a device with a controller vs just USB pass-through. Every disk I've plugged in just shows up fine on the host. I also have only used it with linux.

As for heat, my drives go to sleep when not in use, but even for long stints of backups it wasn't an issue.

Reviews for just the 4-bay: https://www.amazon.com/product-reviews/B078YQHWYW/ref=cm_cr_arp_mb_viewopt_smt?formatType=current_format&pageNumber=1

[–] [email protected] 1 points 50 minutes ago

Thanks for the reply! I have a couple USB 3.0 2-drive docks that just sit out in the open - consolidating in to a single, enclosed unit with a fan would be nice (since mine or open, you really hear the HD spin up/click when accessing it).

What do you use to adjust your drives' spin down? hdparm? hd-idle? I have one drive that is constantly spinning/accessed so the thermal concerns with the unit do weigh on me.