Adding Drives to your Home Server Is EASY! …right?

USB on a server can work, I've done it myself.. but for the $300 you'd spend on this, you can have all the hardware minus drives for the NAS you built on a Supermicro X10SLL server board and no USB compromises. Mine with a Quadro P400, 3 of those WD Red 4 TB drives, 3 SSDs and a 2.5 Gb Nic in it draws under 30 watts at idle, and I still have room for an HBA if I need more storage. Mini-PCs have plenty of utility in a home lab, but I wouldn't use one as a NAS if your drive requirements forced you to use USB storage.

Thanks for the information about passing through the serial numbers. That was information that I couldn't find anywhere else.

price is too high vs diy

$300 too much for that. We should start seeing more offerings like this from other vendors as the chipsets are main stream now. USB by DESIGN is RELIABLE! The problem is the specific chipsets and old firmware on them (both host and device).

This video came out at the perfect time! I'm looking to use a mini PC as an all-in-one home server for a 2.5gb router, NAS, Plex, etc. Really looking forward to your long term review, especially if things drop out!

Yep, 200$ price tag or 6hhd support either is better, but in this case, i rather get the nas, and enjoy the wireless life, + i can install casaos, then wire guard and then I can access it from anywhere

Really wish these enclosures had SAS/SATA connectors to bypass the USB entirely for the HD bays—it would still mean bridge chips for the NVMe to SATA, which would probably increase the cost, but I don't really want to connect via USB if I can help it.

For a lot less money I've been really impressed by the Syaba 8 bay DAS, which is also over USB. I've had no dropouts that I can perceive, and this is running on a N95 mini PC serving up Jellyfin, SMB, and Hyper-V.

I have been having a similar issue with my zfs pool/samba crashing multiple time throughout the transfer alll the time. Dmesg sadly doesn't show any errors when it happens. I have looked all over, but I haven't been able to find what is causing the issue. It was nice to see that I'm not the only one who has these kinds of dropouts.

The easy way of adding more drives to your home server is to simply buy an ATX/mATX case with a lot of 3.5" slots. People who buy mini PCs for NAS use cases will end up spending more money and taking up about the same space as an mATX case when adding a DAS.

Terramaster is one of those companies who's products usually make me go "That's cool, but it's also $20-60 more than I'm comfortable paying for that quality of device", and they almost broke the pattern with this one. NVMe storage is too expensive for those transfer speeds, but without those slots it's functionally the same device as it's predecessor, which had the same price problem as always.

Thanks for the review as I am looking at a way to add more disks to my Unraid server. Cheers from Nova Scotia...

I'm looking for a way to keep local backups of some of the data on my existing NAS and I feel like this is actually a perfect thing to fill with smallish surplus drives and plug into one of my existing MFF home servers. I was almost resigned to just buying a beefy external HDD but this is a more interesting solution

The price tag, for something to add 4x SATA plus 4x m.2 device to an existing PC/Server seems to be quite good. But as you mentioned I don’t see a use case for me. With that amount of drives I either would like to use hardware raid spanning ALL drives, or ZFS. But ZFS via USB seems janky. On the other hand I like to see devices with compromises for less money. Thunderbolt would be nice, but I guess it would ramp up the price significantly…

Thank you for the video Yeah, I'm looking at an e-hba card and a similar 4-bay enclosure that accepts both SAS/SATA drives. Slightly more expensive but guaranteed to work flawlessly.

19:42 I'm sure it will work for years, look at the chia handbook, people have done it for 200TB total USB connected to usb pi's, much less a pc.

for me its easy with the right sata cables for some of the drives though i need to work on cable management

I mean you might get better speeds with a M.2 to sata adapter but this is neater. plus this could be a fairly substantial small backup drive storage.

Ive always had issues when using usb storage with a server. So i started using unraid with older sata2 host adapters which worked alot better than usb. By never dropping out. But they are much slower when only running sata 2 speeds. My cages for hotswapping drives also are only sata 2. Have 2 four bay and 1 three bay enclosure that fit in 5.25 bays. The 4bays use three 5.25 bays and the 3bay uses two 5.25 bays. My inwin q500 cases both have five 5.25 bays. Plus they fit five or six 3.5 drives internally.

I am a newbie when it comes to networking and NAS solutions, but I have a idea of one I want to try but I’m unsure if it’s feasibility. My solution to a small NAS is to use a mini-PC (Beelink Mini S12 Mini PC) with a 128GB NVME M.2 for the OS and Urbackup as the NAS software solution, a 4Tb SATA 2.5 SSD for interior storage expansion. That’s for the first part, the further expansion plan is to attach a 4 Bay HDD Cage Chassis, connecting it to the Beelink through a NVME M-Key PCI Express to SATA 3.0 Adapter Converter Hard Drive Extension Card. My only unsure portion of the NAS, is my decision to power the 4 Bay Chassis using a Pico UPS (24pin DC ATX PSU 12V DC Input DC 12V 150-watt Pico PSU) as the power source attaching a COMeap ATX Power Jumper Cable to turn the chassis on/off. On paper it seems as if it should work but of course like I stated I’m a newbie. What do you think? Would it work?