Thought this might be helpful as a lot of these mini PCs are hitting the used market.

  • pirat@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    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.

    • SanguineBrah@lemmy.sdf.org
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      3 months ago

      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.