I tried running ZFS with a USB JBOD enclosure and the performance was pretty awful. It worked great when I was using eSATA but I don’t think USB liked accessing the disks in parallel. Maybe newer USB versions will work better.
DAS + mini PC is a homebrew NAS. If you intend to have it switched on 24/7, then its nature is no different than the NAS that you replaced. I won’t worry about performance with USB 3.1 (10Gbps link). But an external enclosure introduces one more failure point.
With that said, personally I still couldn’t grasp the idea NAS taking off at home many years ago and the trend seems to continue. I meant most homes don’t need a separate NAS! Or do they?
DAS as DAS, is ideal for home use, personal computing, adhoc data access or cold data storage. You can turn it on when needed. No need to keep disks spinning 24/7 for 99% data stored that you access once a few weeks, months or a year perhaps.
So after much testing, the USB storage “works” but stops working a lot. So I sent it back and Just went with a few 4 tb ssd/nvme to fill all the internals.
I guess next thing to do would be to figure out how to power a bunch of SSDs and get a pcie card to go to multiple satas. Then just 3d print a bottom that would hold more storage.
or, now that asus made that nvme storage thingy just get one of those.
I’d thought about trying this for awhile but ended up going with overkill rackmount used server hardware instead. Would be a neat solution for a cheap home NAS if it was more reliable.
easy home file server (“NAS”) plus it can utilize Backblaze Personal Unlimited backups for all the attached volumes.
been running 24/7 for many years without issue. The hard part was settling on that OWC enclosure, my previous Orico enclosure would randomly disconnect after a few days all the time
Using Thunderbolt 3/4 connection makes a noticeable difference in data transfer speeds too, even over the network
if all you are doing is hosting some data, you do not need TrueNas or Unraid or any of the above, macOS has RAID1/10 built-in along with the standard SMB, etc… For “nightly backups” just toss in an extra volume for Time Machine.
Right now, I have two 20TB WD Gold drives in RAID1, and separate drive for Time Machine.
Make sure to get a 2018 model Mac Mini with Intel CPU if you really care about VM’s and such, or just run your VM’s on a separate system
Similar here. M1 mac mini with 10Gbit network connected to two OWC thunderbay mini housing 4x 2TB Crucial MX500 each. Both are running in deathwish mode aka RAID0 but it’s all backed up as well. Overhead seems managable, I get 1500MB/s reads and writes when benchmarking with Blackmagic Disk Speed Test, more than enough performance for 10gig.
The nice thing going with APFS is that you can do the backup straight with Time Machine that way. No need for any additional software setup. My Time Machine is a Synology 1019+ with 5x 16TB Exos drives, which also handles my other two macs. Last step is gonna be cloud backup of the Synology but I still have to decide on what service to use.
fwiw one of the key reasons I went with 2018 Intel Mac Mini vs. any M1/M2/etc. model is that the former has 4x Thunderbolt ports, while the latter only has 2. The extra Thunderbolt ports have proven to be handy on many occasions. The main downside being that 2018 models are gonna start losing OS support and updates a lot sooner (if not already?)