Mini Nas with USB Disk Enclosure

Hey there! I’m looking to making a small NAS/email server with an old mini pc i had lying around. On the software side, it is pretty settled, I’m probably using NixOS with ZFS to manage the disks. The big question for me is how i will have the disks stored. I thought of getting a USB enclosure to put inside 2 disks in raid mirror, or raid z1. However, I’ve also seen some reddit posts and some other posts here on the forum saying that there might be issues since the enclosures might not be transparent to device UUIDs. Would getting 2 enclosures of 1 disk help mitigate this issue by providing some other form of identification?

Device UUIDs should be OK if you use a udev rule or add the actual davices and partitions to your array using the symlinks in /dev/disk/by-id or /dev/disk/by-uuid/.

(I wouldn’t trust USB with this, both for things going wrong under USB power-saving and for device robustness and data throughput on the USB enclosures. You’ve picked this as your solution, I hope it goes well for you.)

Nevertheless, good luck, especially with roll-your-own-email in 2025.

K3n.

Thank you for your answer. I don’t think throughtput will be all that limiting, even if it does 1 or 2 Gbit, my processing and my network will always be the bottleneck. I might test what disks show up using some current 2.5" hdd enclosures I got. Regarding email, there’s simple NixOS mail server, and besides, rn I am paid by my Uni to be a sys admin, and i have to migrate everything to NixOS regardless, so it should be fine