SABRENT 10 Bay 3.5” SATA Hard Drive Tray Less Docking Station Expired

Rather than go that route, there are NAS boards available on AliExpress which have really interesting specs and they only cost $170 for the board and embedded processor.

For one, many of them have at least 4 2.5Gbe Ethernet ports, meaning you can also run OPNsense on them and turn them into a router.

They have 6 SATA ports onboard and at least one PCIe slot if you need more.

Also, some run off a DC barrel jack, meaning you don't need to buy a separate power supply.

As far as cases go, there's a company called Jonsbo that makes ITX cases with hot swap bays built in, which is perfect for these boards.

Thanks for the info.

Wouldn't those NAS boards be fairly limited in running home server docker containers and VMs, as offered by NAS software like Unraid?

As to the Ethernet ports, you can easily and cheaply add those to a normal desktop via PCIe or USB ports; upgrade to 10/25/40/50Gb if you feel like it. Some motherboards include two ports and/or 10Gb Ethernet right on the back panel.

Same for SATA ports; you get 6 on that motherboard(more on others), and you can add more via PCIe.

Also, the motherboard combo I linked has four M.2 SSD slots; use them for cache/OS/VM/Docker drives, or install a Coral AI accelerator in one and use it for visual recognition and alerts in a Frigate home security camera system.

You could also install a GPU to run local AI software like Llama chat or Stable Diffusion image generation.

It just feels like you have a lot more capabilities, performance, and upgradeability with a PC with a normal modern CPU than with a NAS board.

Of course, maybe that's overkill for you, and a power efficient NAS board is perfect for your needs.

But again, thanks for the info; it's great to know the different options for building out a NAS/home server.

oh, makes sense, but I never heard of that brand of food, so maybe it's regional only>?

Meh, I personally would rather spend a bit more and get way more functionality with an old dell server machine.

If you are new to das and nas, I do not recommend buying the ugreen nas. It is the best money to hardware currently (8 bays 12th gen intel), but the software is still ?alpha? ?beta?... nothing is working yet. You are buying on a promise.

I dont know enough... I have to research if they are able to see your data. Will the virus hitting the other nas will affect it? Can China look into your stuff? Nothing is finalized as far as I know.

I know that they heavily edit their software at this time. You can not install any other os even if you go into the bios. So if the company dies, your software can not be updated, and the hardware is a paperweight unless you ok will not point it to the net (air gap) or ok with it being hack later on.

Best ready to go is synology 8 bays 1821. It is the newest most bays without the need to be hounded by synology to buy their drives. terramaster and asustor and other ready to go nas has some problem in the past. You can search if they have resolved it or not.

Got dizzy reading all the comments. I think this is for data hoarders like me. I save everything, for what I don't know. I met another one at a computer swap meet I go to and he said he was a data hoarder and that is where I learned of my disease. I have a lot of external drives that I look over once in awhile and see stuff I forgot that I had saved. I have plenty of hard drives I picked up over the years so this would be perfect to put them in. I have a few 8 gig Western Digital I bought that I haven't shucked which are pretty full. When the big drives came out ( I started computing around 1990) I always said that was a lot of info to lose. I have one raid unit with 4 8 gig drives with stuff I don't want to lose. The rest is expendable, lose it and who cares. Most not important. Anyway this unit would be perfect. Since it has a switch for each drive you wouldn't have to have all the drives running at once. I have Sabrent hubs and external enclosures which have never failed me. That is my opinion. Now I will keep my eye on this and wait for the price to drop more. When and if it does I will get one. That is if they don't come up with a 15 or 20 unit one.

Storage spaces is notoriously terrible when it comes to data recovery, overall speed, and overall reliability. I wouldn't trust at all. But you're 100% right, hardware raid isn't recommended either. which means for redundant arrays, you want something that runs linux or bsd at it's core. there are quite a few easy-to-use storage-centric solutions such as truenas scale, unraid, openmediavault, etc. Truenas is pretty great, I use it in production in multiple locations, it's super easy to install and manage, it's free, and supports as many disks as your computer does (and works great with SAS HBAs and SAS JBODs as well for expansion), uses zfs for redundancy which is fantastic, and has a very friendly webui.

Hardware-wise though USB is ABYSMAL for reliable storage as the cheap usb controllers used in stuff like this likes to disconnect randomly and try to reconnect which is hell on redundant storage systems.

hardware raid is pretty much dead now, particularly with the move toward software defined storage. there really isn't appreciable overhead on modern machines for software raid, either classic raid setups like mdraid56 or more modern (significantly better) implementations like zfs. Do things slow down during the occasional scrub (that you can usually run off-hours and have the option of limiting the performance on?)) sure. but that scrub is your bit rot protection that many hardware raid controllers don't bother to implement. then there's the raid write hole to consider that most hardware raid cards simply don't. then there's the matter of because zfs is both raid system as well as file system and it's copy-on-write, recovery from power failures or bad-checksummed-on-write blocks is to simply back up to the previous state and it's ready for retry instead of dumping bad data to the disk leaving it in an inconsistent state... I could write books on experiences on why hardware raid is terrible... modern proper raid with zfs or i suppose btrfs (though I admit my lack of experience with btrfs honestly) is the way to go with single machine storage systems. - if you want a rack of storage though, and you've got proper high speed networking and ssd caching, ceph is sometimes more appropriate (but most people don't run ceph at home either unless it's for something like a small proxmox cluster.

tl;dr: with enough ram for the ARC, and a reasonably modern cpu (like 8th gen intel onward or zen+ onward) there should realistically be very little overhead on a proper zfs setup and doing so with SAS is going to be SIGNIFICANTLY more reliable than usb.

I've been using one of these since last October and it's been rock solid so far. I use StableBit DrivePool [stablebit.com] to combine all disks into a single drive letter, paired with SnapRAID [snapraid.it] for onsite parity redundancy, and Backblaze Personal [backblaze.com] for unlimited cloud backup.

Dedicating one parity disk for every four data disks and maxing out each bay with a 20TB drive (could even go higher) provides a max of 160TB of data in a single enclosure.

There's a lot of NAS vs. DAS debate in this thread, but it all boils down to your specific needs and use case. For me, I decided to prioritize storage and utilize my existing gaming desktop to handle Plex transcoding vs. pay the premium for a separate NAS with worse specs. If you need something powered on 24/7, then a NAS probably makes more sense.

So you shut down your Plex? And have to start it when needed?

And nas don't need top end specs. 5 year old pc will work fine.

What does Unraid have to do with this?

This is a DAS. Do your homework.

Can confirm, I have this on my Plex server as JBOD and it's excellent. Zero issues at all.