Can We Build a Home Server Out of Mini PCs?

[@ASUSTOR_YT]

1:30 There is totally a difference between us and QNAP though. We allow it and will not deny the warranty.

[@hateWinVista]

Excellent.

[@UnknownEntity420]

🤭

[@llortaton2834]

lets not even talk about synology day zero vuln, a friend i know lost half his information to ransomware, pulled the ethernet just in time to save his most important data.

[@ASUSTOR_YT]

@@llortaton2834 We definitely recommend maintaining good 3-2-1 backups. No software solution is 100% safe.

[@Nathan_Woodruff]

1:18

[@TechnoTim]

Huge fan of clustered mini PCs! 3 of them replaced a few "modern" 1u servers at a faction of the power and dollar cost!

[@Mikesco3]

Really nice to see you here Tim!

[@derekp6636]

its technotim! yep a coworker convinced me to switch from my giant t5500 2 node setup to clustered mini pcs, much less heat and noise let alone the powerbill. Just grabbed a few newer nodes to build an additional docker swarm cluster out of.

[@theundertaker5963]

Hi Tim, Would love to see a video on how to set it all up as I have a whole bunch of them just laying around here doing nothing.

[@worldgate989]

And in 6 month's it will be something else to replace that.

[@scentilatingone2148]

Thx for the idea! I've been stuck wanting servers and a rack for the sake of having a server rack.

[@spiralout112]

Nice to hear there's finally some options out there for attaching disks through usb that are decent! Be awesome if you could keep us updated on this or get a mention on exactly what controllers are good.

[@admante]

Definitely interested in your roundup of enclosures. I've been looking to try to accomplish this but got scared off by so many different ways enclosures can bomb.

[@coolestrock2008]

same.

[@tom4296]

same

[@VastCNC]

Here for it as well

[@loicdupond7550]

Same here as well. Wanted to do exactly this but could not find out recommendations on which enclosures to go for as well as what is their power consumption

[@zushiba]

I built a home server out of a used ChromeBox Asus CN60. I threw a 256gig SSD & 16 gigs of ram in it. It is NOT powerful but it runs Pihole, Home Assistant, Uptime Kuma, Next Cloud, A MariaDB instance & an image hosting website for my wifes project which requires her to host several images. We're running a Cloudflair Tunnel /w a $2 domain name that I bought on sale. All in it cost me a little over $60. Been rock friggin solid! I'm running Debian/CasaOS. It runs fantastically, performs great and sips power.

[@devemia]

I have the same unit, and my OpenWRT firewall is chillin' on it, 1 Gbe symmetrical. I also have a few equivalent specs units (Intel 1st and 2nd gen), and Ubuntu server rocks on them. All have 2 GB RAM and 32 Gb SSD or less.

[@Brian-bq9up]

I would love to see more content on this topic. This is precisely what I’ve been looking to do but didn’t think it was possible to hook up an external drive bay to most mini pcs as I was thinking I needed a PCIE slot for a sas adapter. This is a clever approach

[@Radek125]

I've been running two of the 5 gig proboxes for my media for over 5 years. Besides replacing the fan and modifying the bays to increase air flow. Rock solid

[@Level1Techs]

It's crazy they haven't improved the front grill or fan since them IMHO

[@purplepioneer5644]

I was actually looking at their enclosures a little while ago so this info has been great, I was going to stretch to something a bit more expensive but I think i’ll give one of these a go alongside my OWC to expand storage/backup.

[@fabriglas]

Noisy? Could you run ssd in it instead?

[@UnderLoK]

I would definately like to see some more USB enclosures. I think most of us have had this idea kicking around since the mini-pc thing took off with Ryzen, but USB doesn't scream reliability at least to me. My servers here at home are ancient, one is a 920 and the other is a 2680. They will both run until the end of time, but that's boring... lol

[@MrMartinSchou]

Speaking of power usage - it'd be interesting to see a kWh per day/week/month/year comparison for these types of things for home usage - especially for things where you're expecting a long lifetime in the home.

[@davidgunther8428]

That would be use load dependent. Ithink hard drives are about 4-10W each. I mean, there's 24 hours in a day, so multiply by 0.040kW and get kWh/day.

[@eDoc2020]

One watt is 8.76 kWh/year*, so multiply accordingly. It's easy enough to use 10 instead, that also adds headroom or accounts for occasional light loading. So a system idling at 40 watts will probably use 400 kWh/year under home usage. *That's for non-leap years. Leap years are 8.784.

[@garydeluce464]

I had two of these exact Proboxes on an Asus C246 Pro running Stablebit Drivepool. I had 19 drives (8 in the proboxes, 3 on a cheap PCIe card, and 8 onboard SATA controller). This resulted in slightly over 200tb in Drivepool (plus snapraid). This Frankenserver ran everything for me and was a beast for years. The only issue I had was when Windows update borked the drive letters and I lost some media. All in all, these Promedia boxes drastically surpassed my expectations and ran reliably for years (on an UPS of course). I mention this because it WILL work but eventually I wasn't able to sleep at night and have since moved to a Synology NAS and a Dell R440 with ZFS in Proxmox. I still have these boxes and some 10tb drives hanging around. A friend of mine isn't doing well financially at the moment but desperately needs a NAS for his media business. Thanks, Wendell for illuminating this option for me. I'm going to donate one the proboxes and some drives and build him a NAS. All he'll have to buy is a NUC.

[@Technopath47]

I was considering doing EXACTLY this to replace my current 4U server chassis which ended up never actually being put in a rack as my plans for my homelab changed (and the chassis ended up being kinda not great). Thanks for covering this!

[@spigs1690]

Wow are you me? I’m basically in the same situation as you (4U chassis ideals fell through). I was originally considering something like one of those Topton Aliexpress boards for a downsize, but this video is making me reconsider. This seems more economical.

[@angry_wizard]

This is exactly what I did. Bought a generic N100 Mini-PC and hooked it up to a Yottamaster 4-bay enclosure fitted out with 12tb Ironwolf drives. Threw Ubuntu on it, installed ZFS and put the disks in RAIDZ1, even put a 2.5" SSD into the mini-PC as a cache. Makes for a mean little Plex server for me, my partner, parents, siblings and best friend. Whole thing cost $1400 CAD (that's around $1000 USD).

[@magran17]

Hi from Victoria 🇨🇦

[@LuxStroy]

It upsets me that there are no compact cases for 2.5" HDD/ssd. I would like such a DAS with two 8TB SSDs and connect it to my mini PC

[@tuliof]

I bet the HDDs made the bulk of the cost

[@rudysal1429]

I have an older Lian li case that is MITX and I can fit 5-6 HDDS, really 5 because I don't feel the 6th would very enough airflow. My biggest issue is finding a better upgrade to an amd 3200g and asrock motherboard that is affordable and has either 2.5gb ethernet, pcie 16x that maybe can be split into two for a 10gb nic and hba card.

[@angry_wizard]

Mini-PC was $180, enclosure was $200ish so yup. @@tuliof

[@thepeakoflife]

Looking forward to the hard drive enclosure videos. I’m running 2 minisforum HX90 home servers. One is a back up. I fitted 64 gb or ram, 2 4tb SSDs, and a host 1tb m.2 drive in each server for the past year. Incredible performance just would love more storage options.

[@BoopyTheFox]

Dude i have exact same setup, but just for 1 of them

[@txijene]

I've got 3 Dell Optiplex 3080 Micros running side-by-side I got for $100 a piece from a local business. i5-10500T CPUs, 1TB SSDs, 64GB DDR4 (I had purchased new storage and RAM) One running Windows Server 2022 to play with AD, IIS, NFS, DNS, and similar One running Proxmox for playing with VMs and Containers and creating an "unlimited" number of other softwares, apps, and tools. Another that acts as a host in the domain so I can play with GPO and MDM solutions Very small amount of space that these things take up, I have essentially zero redundance right now though. Working on that...

[@camberwellcarrot420]

I bought this exact Mediasonic about a month ago, mostly based on Wendell's lukewarm approval of it, and have it connected to an old HP Prodesk on which I installed Openmediavault (new to me), sharing out 4 hard drives which I moved out of an old tower PC, mostly for Plex which I have running on an N95 mini PC (running LMDE) which was dirt cheap and works great for Plex. It's been a solid solution, running the drives in the Mediasonic, and I also connected two WD Elements external drives to the Prodesk. S.M.A.R.T all works and the drives themselves are identified properly with serial numbers and everything else. I'm pretty happy with it so far. Thanks for the info and half-hearted recommendation Wendell! 😉 I'm glad I didn't spend more.

[@david.godlewski]

Which model? I just got the HFR7-SU31CH and I'm having issues creating a ZFS pool with the drives in the enclosure - I suspect because it's the RAID compatible model. Curious what your experience is!

[@GSP-76]

Ive been using mini pcs and 5 drive bay to run my Plex server for years now... it's been rock solid.

[@axonn101]

I was considering this mini-pc home server route but looking at places like the homeserver subreddit felt like a flood of information that made it look like this was not the route to take. Hearing the reasonable upsides and downsides in this video it honestly sounds like this is the right choice for me. If I can get a decent external USB enclosure for 3.5” drives I can hopefully stop using pCloud and instead just look for a cloud service to back stuff up.

[@cosmolotov]

I was so keen to try something like this out myself that I bought a (what I thought) was a good looking 5-bay enclosure to try and use it with a mini PC I had. Problem was that the enclosure abstracted away the serial numbers of the connected hard drives, which meant that using software raid would have been very risky since it wouldn't be able to reliably distinguish between the different hard drives in order to maintain the raid configuration.

[@kuro68000]

We are at an awkward time now where NAS is moving towards solid state, but still need HDDs for bulk. Very few options exist for 2.5" and NVMe drives. An (m)ATX size case, no space for PSU as you will use a Pico, and a front full of 5.25" bays (for 2.5" and 3.5" hot swap modules) would be ideal. The only thing like that on the market is currently not available anywhere.

[@Geo64x]

3D print it!

[@kuro68000]

@@Geo64x I've thought about it, but it's not easy. Laser cutting might work better too.

[@knghtbrd]

I actually had this older enclosure of this type that exposed four eSATA ports. It was older enough that it was not specified to be SATA 3, but since there was very little in the way of electronics in there, it worked for four 8TB drives, which is what I had in there for years. Good box. I don't use it anymore because it can't seem to handle drives that are 14TB properly. Power demands are just too high I think. I'd love to see just a good external drive box. Or really any good solution for just handling a stack of drives. Data hoarder gonna data hoard.

[@malifestro3319]

I've actually been doing this with the 8 bay version labeled as 3.1 gen 2, Same diff, for years. My implementation was prior to Unraid ZFS support, so it is quite a unicorn. Since then Truenas and Unraid have made great strides and I have considered starting over. But you all know what kind of work that is. Needless to say, I am waiting for the right device. I would really like to see Minisforum, Beelink, or someone develop a cool 5 enclosure to handle 3.5s while still giving room for 2 NVMEs and 2 2.5" SATA SSDs. This device would build an amazing off the shelf Unraid home server capable of running your nas, plex, and home server. Stuff it with a nice processor of course. I am sure there would be quite the audience!

[@Eridescent]

I did something like this for years - small form factor PC with all four drives of my storage attached through the same USB 3.2 enclosure. It wasn't ideal, but it definitely worked.

[@stephengentle2815]

I’m looking at the Terramaster D6-320 for this kind of setup. I had an Intel NUC 11th Gen, replaced it with a 13th Gen and the 11 will become my new home server.

[@TheBaldOne]

I've been running NUCs as servers for a long time now. They're awesome for low power/medium performance for my needs. I have 2 full servers running at home in "normal" hardware and 2 remote NUCs running UnRAID (I know it's overkill but I like to have the webui and community applications easily available via VPN). I've been toying with the idea of getting a 3rd NUC with enough storage to create an onsite cold backup storage, that USB storage box seems really interesting, I have to check it out. By the way, I use the term NUC loosely here as none of them are actually NUCs but Gigabyte boxes, etc..

[@MarvinLjungqvist]

Great spark of ideas, have been looking to overhaul my home serverstack to a more energy friendly and smaller footprint solution and this hasn't been on my mind at all. Love this outside the box ideas for us willing to push the boundaries of what's possible. ❤

[@Nedski42YT]

A compact and inexpensive 4 drive array that is small enough to sit on TOP of a 4x4" NUC sized mini-pc is the Sabrent DS-4SSD for ~$90. It has a USB3 5 Gb/s interface. Put in four 8GB 2.5" SATA SSD's and you'll have a nice little Plex server. The only negative thing I know about it is the fan noise. The airflow design is bad. My solution was to drill more intake holes and remove some of the unneeded internal bracing structure. If I had a 3D printer I would redesign the case.

[@johntang9173]

doing exactly same thing with a older NUC+a 4 bay USB; mainly for non-critical media storage and BT :P. Really a low cost and low power solution good for myself running on Openmediavault. With support of docker compose I am able to explore more usage quickly, too.

[@mcwild11]

YES! This is exactly my project. Build resilient cluster from consumer HW. For home / extended family /small business

[@7MBoosted]

I really wish the likes of ASRock and BioStar still made m-atx imbeded motherboards with decent pcie connectivity at a reasonable price. Being able to put together an N100 or N300 machine with an IT mode SAS card and a 2.5gbps nic sound like the makings of any extremely cool DIY power efficient NAS.

[@davea6037]

This has been my solution for a local hosted game server and NAS for a couple years now. I went from a Xeon x99 m-atx build, to a simple beelink 5600h w/ 32gb of ram and a 4 bay enclosure over usb c 3.0 connection. I don't do daily or weekly backups, but I use the raid on the enclosure for vaulting important content. It was cheaper than my x99 setup, and about 1/2 the size, not to mention x99 xeons aren't exactly peppy these days, the 5600h is way, way faster. It always blew my mind that diskless NAS's on amazon and online with like atoms and celerons were going for upwards of 300-600$. My mini-pc running as a headless was less than 400$ on sale, and it came with that 5600h, 32gb of ddr4, and a 500gb nvme drive.

[@wikingagresor]

Wendell, one use of such system is to build a base for a 'van assistant', a lightweight and power-efficient computing server with security monitoring capabilities.

[@Gryfang451]

Speaking of longevity, I've been running two HP N40L Microservers forever. One PSU finally gave up the ghost. It was a backup to a backup, but I still feel sorry enough for the old guy that I may replace the PSU. They were running FreeNAS, then TrueNAS core. They are over 10 years old, and have had 2 or 3 generations of hard drives, memory upgrades, but other than that, no much. They just kept working.

[@trapexit]

Problem with multiplexed USB to SATA adapters is stability. Almost always if one drive is reset they all reset. My preference, if sticking with USB, is using individual usb - sata adapters connected to a solid hub. I've not looked but it would be nice if there was a 3d printable case that would allow drives to just slide in.

[@mrdizz1e]

Thanks for sharing this. What do you mean by “solid hub?” Just a USB hub? Powered vs bus-powered? Or something more specific?

[@trapexit]

@@mrdizz1e A good quality powered hub. Not some random no name job.

[@JamieStuff]

I had one of the older 5Gb/s Probox units on my home server (Unraid) a while back, connected via eSATA. It would run fine for a few days to a week, then randomly go offline. It turns out that the default setting on that unit was when all drives were spun down, after a certain amount of time (30 mins?) the box would shut off. The solution (which was not listed in the manual) was to disable "power sync", so it stayed on even when the drives were spun down.

Hi! Can use an old PC case as well with the mini pc there instead of the PSU and the pcb of the enclosure. More options for expansion, cooling and connectivity.

[@SwirlingDragonMist]

I feel your style and expertise adds allot to this space, mostly what I see are reviews of iterative commodity junk made by hammers and cycles, and what may be familiarity bias covering just one platform.

[@_sneer_]

When it comes to power usage my i7-9700 with 2x8GB DDR4, 1 sata ssd, PCIe LSI megaraid with 2xHitachi enterprise HDDs in RAID 1 for data, uses about 52W most of the time. I am running Slackware with manually installed Nextcloud and docker containers: Invidious, portainer, prowlarr, transmission, heimdall and some other stuff. When I am downlading torrents and using nextcloud at the same time it may go just over 60W. Pegged about 160W. Whole setup didn't cost more than 300. You don't need expensive and newest stuff for your home server. I have plenty of resources left for more services if I need them.

[@purplepioneer5644]

I actually did something similar but using an entry level M1 Mac Mini that has served me well for a few years now. With a 4 bay OWC enclosure I picked up cheap (way cheaper than normal, like $150-200 iirc). Before anyone piles on about the price of a Mac Mini, I was working for Apple at the time and was on my way out. Used my employee discount and a $300 employee credit to lower the price of the Mac Mini to $250 or something after tax. Might have been even cheaper. It replaced a 2008 dual xeon Mac Pro i’d got on ebay for $200 back in 2016. Lightyears ahead in terms of speed and it sips power compared to the dual xeon beast!

[@MarkRose1337]

There's an appealing opportunity at 2:33

[@zachb4047]

I have been considering building my own 'enclosure' with a Topton MoB and then getting a mini PC to access it all over NFS and do all the heavy lifting.

[@26Macdylan]

I loved the videos about the synology camera setup. Any advice to have a home server with the hardware you showed + good camera/storage solution? Keep up the great work!

[@sqlazer]

My current NAS setup is a mini pc I bought off amazon, an "AWOW AZ51", N5105/8gb/dual-2.5gbe machine. I run Windows 10 LTSC as my "server" os. I have a couple WD Element drives attached via USB 3.0, and Stablebit Drivepool doing all of the mergerfs style heavy lifting. I run most of my network services on other machines, but this one handles all of my file tasks. Backup to Backblaze, runs a VM running Proxmox Backup Server, etc. The only thing on this file server that isn't "file dedicated" is a plex server, only because the N5105 is actually pretty darn good at low power transcoding. The rest of the machines in my homelab are small proxmox nodes. I'm very happy with my entire system

[@PhonePhreak3z]

I can't till I'm in the position to be able to build a small home server/NAS.. One day, hopefully. Awesome video!!

[@MichaelSmith-fg8xh]

What do you think that costs? How much storage?

[@vedranart]

Running Proxmox on my HP Elitedesk with i5 and 32GB RAM. Under proxmox I'm running: - Shinobi CCTV for 5 IP cameras - Portainer under which I run a wordpress site and some other services - Cloudflare Tunnelling so that I can access my services via my domain - Home Assistant - Open Media Vault for sharing folders and syncing files with my backup server - using 2x2TB NVMe via USB-c for this Second mini PC is Intel NUC Skull with i7 which I use as Proxmox backup. And this setup runs for me 24/7 without a problem and I still have a lot of CPU power left.

[@walterbartek6830]

I just got a sabrent 5bay 10g, DS-SC5B, instead of the meadiasonic. connected to a um480xt. would love to see you get the sabrent in for testing. seems like a pretty solid enclosure but its like 40% more expensive edit: didn't make it to the end, you mention running more than 1 enclosure. the sabrent can supposedly daisy chain. there is a yottamaster that has similar functions too.

[@dktol56]

Same enclosure attached to one of the (four available) 10Gb/s USB ports on a HP Elitedesk 800 G4 Mini with an I5-8600T and 64GB RAM. Just barely started testing with three WD 14TB enterprise drives, using Debian 12 and different storage scenarios with mdraid, lvm, or zfs. I'm impressed that the individual mounted drives and enclosure go to sleep properly when I suspend to RAM, then spin up, ready to go, when I wake the system up - no hangs or black screen. Now, will this still work when I combine the drives with zfs?

[@ter0x]

I wonder if that model when there is a blackout recover the last state of energy to avoid activate it manually

[@airman_85uk]

The one with the thunderbolt would be nice for some fast external SSD and daisy chain HDDs. It starts to get messy though

[@gruntlord6]

Literally just went this rabbit hole and ended with the same conclusion! You did end up with a better enclosure though so I'm returning mine and getting this one so I can truly saturate my drives

[@thacommentator]

Can't wait for the Level1 USB type c to 10g ethernet adapter (product description: because nobody else wants to make one)

[@marcogenovesi8570]

they exist, it's just big as a closed fist and runs hot

[@kenzieduckmoo]

"Can We Build a Home Server Out of Mini PCs?" this is literally the dream scenario i thought of when TrueNAS Scale first announced

[@legion3343]

"This one is the least bad... " aye that was how I felt when I was looking at these USB implementations before I just gave up and went the traditional route.

[@lifeHacker42]

Looks like this is available outside the US but for huge shipping markups. I'd love to see a follow up with more options that are more available overseas

[@NelsonMinar]

Really helpful video, I'm trying to build this exact thing but am having a hard time finding a reliable USB enclosure. Unfortunately the Mediasonic Probox you talk about seems to not turn itself on again if power is cut and restored. Some enclosures have physical rocker switches and will turn back on.

[@EminemLovesGrapes]

Checked it out in the EU amazon. 450 euros for the enclosure. That's a no. Probably nded to find a deal somewhere else or use some other brand

[@chromerims]

Of myriad videos from so many tech creators, this topic is the one we've been waiting for. 👍 Can't wait to watch this later on.

[@chbrules]

I bought a 5.25" hot swap 12 bay chassis with SATA/SAS backplane from Newegg years ago for like $150 on sale. I bought some used enterprise 16 port SAS RAID card and a number of 10TB SAS drives for cheap off eBay. I run Alma Linux 9 and setup a ZFS pool for my main storage and have a number of other storage configurations with SATA and nVME SSDs. I bought a consumer grade AMD 3rd gen mobo with a 5600G CPU and 32GB of DDR4 used for cheap. I then got 2x dual 10gbpe SFP+ Intel NICs and bonded them between my workstation and my server for fast xfer. I think maybe I spent $600 on everything max. It works out great because I can run network services, like Pi-Hole, VMs, and other things, all while having a reliable and fast NAS setup.

[@levifig]

I’m with you: how do we not have cheap and accessible 10Gbps USB Ethernet adapters?? Even 5Gbps!!

[@HoshPak]

My biggest challenge to building a home server is finding an mATX case that doesn't suck. It doesn't seem to exist. It's either ITX or ATX.

[@masaharumorimoto4761]

Thanks, I was looking at that exact Mediasonic model, I feel like Alice down the rabbit hole, I just want 4 extra drives for my laptop.

[@zacharysandberg]

I have had an absolutely perfect experience with a USB Ethernet adapter on my micro PC over the past 8 months. I would be open to trying USB for this application as well. Hard to beat a 1L i9-13900 mini PC for power, so Id love to see how I can expand this.

[@Okand2]

I've been using a NUC7i5BNH as my home server since late 2017 and it's been great. Thus far the 250gb nvme m.2 ssd I started with and the 1tb sata ssd I've added is enough. No idea if the usb 3.1 is worth bothering with as you warn though.

[@HakimElGhazouani]

I considered the external hdd bays for my setup,but I ended up removing the enclosure on a 11th gen Intel NUC i5,and put it inside a small itx case and 2 x 14tb drives onto a nvme SATA board 😂 It's working great! And I even have a single 1tb nvme drive as cache. Idle is around 22w 🎉

[@thestreamreader]

please share full setup details. like what itx case etc.

[@philippsolovyev8067]

+1 for the full setup plz

[@ThomasVernonJr]

hi, I'm new to your channel and I'm really enjoying your content and it makes me fell like at home, thanks for the content and sharing your knowledge

[@laughingvampire7555]

you choose to pay with money or time, if you pay with money you can have fun doing other stuff, if you pay with time, you can have setting up everything

[@solocamo3654]

When I retire my i9 10900 / 64gb ddr4 3600 / Intel Arc A380 ( in a Rosewill Thor V2 EATX case) based home server I'll definitely consider the future versions of this. Thanks for the information as always.

[@marble_wraith]

The most recent minisforum boxes i saw on their website are only using Radeon 680m graphics (RDNA2) which means no AV1 hardware support which is a must have IMO if you want to make the most out of the space you've got. Suggested alternative: Bee-link GTR7 or SER7 both have Radeon 780m (RDNA3) graphics with AV1. Servethehome did some reviews recently. Other then that, my biggest annoyance is miniPC's chassis and cooling aren't designed with desktop fans in mind. Most enclosures have a surface area of around ~120mm. And yet instead of using a 120mm desktop fan (which is also more accessible in terms of market) often they're designing proprietary solutions to use some flavor of shitty laptop blower fan... which who knows if it'll be available in a few years.

[@LA-MJ]

Bkmrk

[@rudysal1429]

It would be amazing if the community could fund some sort of mini device with some form of connection that could have sff8088 or whatever the ones are for a box like a DAS that would allow better connectivity and upgradability. Kind of like that hdd box but a modular system so you can add one or more depending on the setup and cost.

[@davidgunther8428]

Minisforum has a 7940hs based UM790 box. It has integrated RDNA3.

[@marble_wraith]

​@@davidgunther8428nice find, their menu system is weird to navigate

[@TheKrnGl]

I'm in the process of moving my unraid in fractal r5 to m720q tiny + probox 4-bay usb-a (i think the 2022 model). We'll see how it goes but I've been tired of unraid's limitations for a while now, and maybe mergerfs + snapraid will serve me well. A lot of people online poo-poo on USB (especially the unraid crowd) so I'm glad this video is correcting the record.

[@fenturi]

I have 2 miniforum PC's and I have that Mediasonic HF7-SU31C, but the best I have found is TERRAMASTER D6-320 6 bay USB 3.2 Gen2 I also use a dell Optiplex 5070 with a low profile 10gb nic and the D6-320 as a fileserver. I used this over the mini's because they are only 2.5 gb networking.

[@thestreamreader]

What is the power usage on this?

[@PCvideoGAMES1400]

I would be interested in that as well, I have ordered a different 4 bay 10 gigabit enclosure for testing, however it draws 11 watts with the fan off and all 4 drives in standby, which is pretty disappointing, at this point I am better off using an ATX board and power supply instead of a mini pc for my home server.

[@michaelmcconnell7302]

Wtf my favorite computer janitor made a video about EXACTLY WTF I'm looking to do this weekend 🤯🥳

[@tek_soup]

im building a mini pc/server/nas today with a JONSBO N3 Mini-ITX build with a 11900K!

[@richkovach]

Thunderbolt 3/4 for further stability and headroom? Something like the OWC ThunderBay boxes (the non-raid ones). They can daisy chain too as a bonus :)

[@LA-MJ]

Bkmrk

[@sonictech1000]

I hope this new generation of enclosures turns out to be reliable. In the past I've tried all sorts and they always seem to find some way to fail.

[@loicdupond7550]

I hope we will get this comparison on time for Black Friday :)

[@EagleSightLabs]

I'm waiting for the day when one of these companies realized they can build a solution that allows for 2-3 m.2 SSDs and 2-3 SSDs to provide to people like us to turn into a small NAS that's low power with decent storage. Probably wouldn't be any bigger than the Intel NUC either. Though the only issue with this idea is that SSDs still aren't up to the storage capacity of a mechanical drive yet. This solution would be fantastic if we ever got SSDs to the point where can buy 20 and 22 TB versions for similar prices to what the mechanical drives are now.

[@TradersTradingEdge]

I have exactly this configuration, but with a RasPi 4 8GB with OpenMediaVault. It's perfect for me, because I don't need a super fast Ethernet. So, super low power consumption, very low pricing for RasPi & the storage case. And OMV has Docker too, so I can use it for soooo many things §8-) Thanks for the great Video.

[@IngwiePhoenix]

Looking for more JBOD stuff! My super old DiskStation - SATA-II, not -III - is really hitting it's limits, and my NanoPi R6s is doing the best it can but ... yeah, 5.10 kernel and the devs are kinda ... eh. So I am looking to create a better home network! Also, I am a little worried about shredding my microSD cards in the NanoPi, lol. Best-case scenario, I can build a mini-cluster with two SBCs, one of them linked to such a storage enclosure and acting as the NAS, whilst the other one runs miscelanious services. Would be so much neat-er. ^^

[@AccidentalMisfire09]

I've been using three 2012 Mac minis in a Proxmox cluster for a couple years now. They're all connected with Ceph and use less power than my Ryzen 5 3600 did with unRAID. Highly recommend for low power, core dense computing for moderately cheap! EDIT: It's lovingly called "the Mac Stack" or "the Stackintosh"

[@xani666]

my NAS uses i3-3250 which is 11 years old CPU, you don't need more for just serving files, unless you're a video editor or something

[@MRPtech]

I have been running proxmox on 12th Gen i7 NUC and it is perfect for me. 4 - 5 VM, couple LXCs and it sips kWh. It is overkill for what I use, but you can say it is future proof to have nuc with 9TB combined storage, 64GB ram and 1260p i7 CPU.

[@dionelr]

I just got a Ryzen mini PC by some no name company (Aoostar) that has 3 NVMe m.2 slots and two full sized 3.5” sata slots for hard drives. I never thought I would use a NAS regularly, but once my wife and kid started using Plex, It’s now a part of my home computing.

[@FragEightyfive]

Hey Wendell, thanks for sharing your views on this sort of setup.I had been looking at this or one of the 4 or 8 bay appliance solutions from Synology, but will probably be going mini-PC + enclosure route now. I have been trying to get my parents and wife off cloud storage, and since my parents live somewhat close, I will build 2 miniPC NAS's, so we each have a local and off-site backup, super important stuff backed up to a cloud (but this reduces cloud requirements from $10's/month to $1's/month). MiniPC is cheaper since I will be building at least 2 identical setups.

[@jodajackson4489]

There are also some nice 8 bay external RAID enclosures that will connect to a NUC like computer too. Probably in the ~$350 range

[@MarkConstable]

I've got a HM90 Minisforum node with 1x NVMe, 2x SSD (all 2TB) and 2x 2.5GbE. 2x NVMe would have been ideal but with Proxmox/ZFS on the single NVMe and Ceph on the pair of SSDs, it's been an excellent node (once I got a pair of replacement SSD cables as they're rather fragile). Just missing a decent USB-C to 10GbE connector... let us know when you find one, Tim.

[@johnmijo]

I've been using the Terramaster USB storage units for a few years now, there is an occasional hitch that seems to require that I power cycle the device, leave it powered off for a minute or two and then power it back on and then all the storage devices show up once more. Basically one or two of the drives on the unit seem to disappear from the drive list unitl I do this. I've got three of these units and all purchased at different times and all have experienced this behavior.

[@zeal514]

This works well. I wish I went with this originally. I have a N5105 NAS board. I think imma make it a TrueNAS server, to exclusively manage my HDDs and SSD clusters. I have 1 NAB6, but I plan to get a 2nd one, this way I have 2 Proxmox servers, and the shared storage in a cluster. Then eventually get a 3rd 1 if I really want for HA. Or just focus kubernetes. Either way, it's really efficient. I'd likely have a external backup drive to back everything up.

[@marcogenovesi8570]

So when can we expect the Level1Tech USB disk boxes? I have tried a bunch of USB enclosures and the most stable and reliable has been to use single enclosures with asmedia controllers

[@themomorain]

6:49 so you are telling me this mini pc can run home assistant?? that would be so awesome?!

[@aspuzling]

One question I have with USB enclosures is how do they handle sleep mode? For example, can the operating system put the drives to sleep when they are not needed and wake them up when they are? Also, I'd love to know which models you _don't_ recommend because unfortuntely the Mediasonic 4 HF7-SU31C that you show here is not available in the UK yet. Which enclosures should I be trying to avoid according to L1T?

[@liquidlar]

The drive bay device does support sleep mode via S3. But in a server situation you are never really putting the server to sleep so this isn't really a factor in that environment. Now in a home PC situation yes it should work if the PC supports S3 Power State. If you are talking about Disk hibernation I'm not 100% sure to be honest but depending on what you are using like in the case of TrueNAS its not recommended to use drive hibernation because it can cause potential issues. In the case of Synology and stuff though yeah that could have its uses but I'm not sure if it works.

[@fitlikeaglove7396]

1:33 Yes, I want 5 Drives + 10w compute idle, But make it 30w so I can put it in HA it / cluster it. How can the USB storage be shared so 3 mini pcs can access the storage? Seems like the path might be network 10Gbit based but that get pricey because the storage has to get it's own compute and now we're basically running janky SANs for a darn homelab. Hope to see some progress on the local USB network and using ceph! That path seemed a lot more attractive to me.

[@OtakuboyT]

I use a few decommissioned SSF 2nd and 3rd Gen Optiplexes I got for free from one of the libraries I work at. I have dozen 2nd/3rd gens (all i3/i5). Then I got 4x 4th gen i7's I use those as Steam Machines.

[@skaltura]

awesome! now let's see this packaged tighter and other variants ;)

[@anthonyojo4082]

12:19 What is that beautiful thang ??!!! :))

[@andrewkamoha4666]

[Title] Can We Build a Home Server Out of Mini PCs? Can we build a home server from a PC disposed in the trash?

[@computerenthusiast402]

USB-C connectors need a secure latch of some sort so they don't accidentally get unplugged

[@ZenRebel33]

I think you are forgetting the option of adding a JBOD to that unit. Yottamaster makes an inexpensive 5 bay JBOD. Which allows you to accomplish what you are looking for. If that unit goes for $200, you are looking at $118 for the Yottamaster. For $318 you are only getting a 2-bay Synology. That does not come with drives. The other thing to consider is those small form factor pc's sip energy. Where a full on server is going to suck down energy. I guess it's all perspective and what you are looking to do with SFF computer.

[@stalbaum]

Old towers, maybe upgrade to a MB with 6 sata slots, a spare pcie slot and TrueNas? You can figure this out for $200 ish. I have.

[@Looki124]

had a friend use a 3d printer to make a new case to turn his beelink ser6 pro into a nas, used a M.2 NVME SATA 3.0 Cards to add 6 sata port and the os on ssd connector i still dont know how he powered the 6 disk but apparently it runned fine

[@screamingiraffe]

3 Zimaboards and an Asustore Pro 12 48TB running ESXi8 works well, I highly recommend both Zimaboards and the definitely the asustore.

[@eDoc2020]

That design of 4-bay HDD enclosure has been around forever. I have one I picked up cheap years ago which has USB 2.0, FireWire, and eSATA so that dates it.

[@Jad2410]

lol, this is my setup I have two of those DASs one connected by type-c and one by type-a USB, to a Beelink SER mini PC.

[@andrewr7820]

RAID5 / RAIDZ1? Noooooo.... If you buy all the drives at the same time and one of them eventually fails, the re-build of the array after replacing the failed drive may result in the failure of ANOTHER drive during the rebuild. RAID rebuilds on 14TB+ drives can take a verrrrrry long time, assuming there are no hiccups. Many storage experts pointed this out more than a decade ago.