I have had nothing but issues trying to use external USB enclosures with large disks (12TB each). Especially hardware RAID boxes. I finally said screw it, cut a hole in the top of the mini PC I'm using as the server, and ran an m.2 to SATA adapter card to connect to esata enclosures, foregoing USB entirely and doing software RAID. It's a frankenstein setup for sure, but ends up being more problem free in the end.
Terramaster is definitely the budget friendly home lab/backup go to, in my opinion. Even though USB is "not recommended" running ZFS, I have not encountered any issues using usb storage as the boot drive (mirrored) in my F2-423 setup, for almost over a year and a half. I have 2 of them, in my setup. One is a SSD NAS running TrueNAS Scale, NextCloud, Syncthing, Tailscale. That is used to sync my iPhone contacts & photos (iCloud ain't getting my money and data LOL), Laptops and various devices data & configs, legally obtained Plex media (Plex runs on another device and not any of the NASes), and the other NAS (HDDs) is running TrueNAS scale, Syncthing to backup the SSD NAS (Only Photos, Contacts, device data & configs. I don't waste space backing up the Plex media, if that is gone too bad). I also backup all my important data and configs to Blu-ray monthly and store the disk offsite. I had no clue Terramaster even sold a 6 bay DAS, I knew of their 6 bay NAS (that looks the same). Keep up the good work proving "da haters" wrong, that just because something is not recommended doesn't mean it doesn't work at all, and doesn't have a use case. I will let you know when I encounter problems with my USB mounted boot drives. Anyway keep on trucking my fellow Jenker.
Something like this really makes sense for a remote backup at a friend’s house. Low power, relatively cheap, and easy to stash. You have an off-site backup, and your friend’s wife doesn’t complain about an outrageously high power bill every month.
The article that you show (The MAC 911) is about adding multiple single usb enclosed drives to a raid setup. The issues addressed by this has nothing to do with your setup, since you are using a single DAS enclosure for all drives. This setup works perfectly. I have been running this for years without issues in a ZFS RAID-Z.
This is a great idea cuz using USB give u more flexibility on what computer you can use for your server, opening options to a wide range of Mini PC with ultra low idle power (whereas these PC do not have many sata port/power for regular HDD connection). I'd also suggest SnapRaid + Mergerfs to take it to another level, giving even more flexibility. I've been using external HDD running on a random PC with samba as a file storage for a while so I approve your setup.
There's a reason OMV removed the USB option from the GUI and why it's generally recommended not to do this. Raid over USB isn't recommended because USB can and will do weird things at the worst times especially when doing things like writing a lot of data to it. You can get terramasters 4 bay NAS for about the same price as this DAS, replace the Terramaster software and have a much better system overall. For something to mess around with and experiment on no problem but it's not really a good idea for something you are going to use a lot.
Same. Even though everyone agrees it's a bad idea, I've been running OMV on a Raspberry Pi with 4 external USB drives in a powered hub for 5 years, using SnapRaid and MergeFS. Zero issues even with regular power outages.
This was helpful. I do video and photography. I store my backup drives (all my spare drives) in 2 towers like this terra master... sitting on my desk because they are usb. I put both tower into a closet with a raspberry pi and then watched a bunch of youtube vids on how to with pi and linux. I gave up on PI and now have ordered a used micro computer i got on ebay. Your videos have been the most helpful as to what the hell a VM, container and docker are/setting them up.
Brett - I seriously was thinking of picking up an enclosure for my HDDs to move my NAS to a spare mini PC. Instead I decided it was better to just convert my desktop into a full-time server. Not a crazy idea to do what you did by any means.
I actually have a similar setup to this, but without RAID, and OMV is in a virtual machine under Proxmox (hard drives passthrough) in my Chinese mini PC. It's been running solid since I built it 3 or 4 months ago. I have a Yottamaster DAS instead, which is almost 3 times cheaper (but 5 drives instead of 6). I think it's 3.2 USB as well, but I could be wrong. I use this setup to backup my main NAS and do other things under Proxmox.
I have this same mini pc with a different DAS running unraid + plex for around 4 months with no issues. Quite a bit cheaper than most NAS and I can always add another DAS to expand the capacity.
@@JeffGeerling I have 72 4TB enterprise drives here... WAITING for a TrueNAS home. And 20 10TB Enterprise just recertified and resectored (520 -> 512). Not to mention all of the darn Enterprise SSDs I have accumulated. I guess it's time to load up the 24 bay Dell r730xd. :) With a Raspberry Pi KVM of course!
The Terramaster DAS is a pretty cool idea. But holy hell $300 for an disk holder? if it were 100-150 sure that is a hell of a deal, but you can buy a used case, several USB to sata adapters, and a USB hub, plug in and go for 1/4 the price. And yes build it yourself is most always going to beat buying a prebuilt, But this seems very Niche for what it is. If they cut the price in 1/2 I'm sure they'd have a hard time keeping these on the shelves for Homelabbers.
I agree and I think something like this should exist. But price needs to come down. Hopefully it does. Icydock 6 bay SSD 5.25" is $80 and they do practically the same thing. @@RaidOwl
Great video. I did enjoy this. Thanks for covering all of this. Love all of the content you make, @RO. One of my favorite channels. You remind me of @ByteMyBits when he first started.
I like the idea of running those tiny PC for NAS. I'd probably run JBOD instead of RAID if using USB DAS, since it might be safer as a usb drive, but then it loses redundancy of raid.
When I think of a NAS I envisage my Raspberry Pi, its powered hub and 6 multi Terabyte USB disks. It supports SAMBR, FTP, any additional Linux functionality that I needed to add (DDNS, Rsynch, sheduled backups, auto time synch, nmon, etc etc), Internet remote access and it runs headless or connected via VNC. In total it cost me less than $100 excluding disks. (Admittedly it is rather slow, but I can stream 2 videos simultaneously so that's good enough for me.) It has worked almost flawlessly for 4 years so far and now has 20TB of disk space.
Oh wow, I was literally thinking about making a similar setup for my dad, and then this video pops up. Coincidence, or does Brett work for Big Data 🤔 Brett, what do you think about making a sort of all-in-one tech quickie style video that covers networking from top to bottom for beginners? Things like explaining what DHCP is, what a DNS is, what common terms you see in the community are like pfsense, etc. I made my first NAS following your videos almost exclusively, so I know you've already covered a lot of this in your other videos, but I think it would be nice to have it all sort of neatly compiled into a single video that a beginner with no knowledge could always reference back to as a one stop shop when they run into issues. Speaking personally as a beginner, I found your style of explanation to be funny and easy to digest, and I think the visuals you use to help explain are really helpful.
I have been running a similar setup for about a year now. It is a Lenovo Tiny paired with a TerraMaster 5 bay DAS. I used UnRaid and haven't had any issues. People warn against it but I've never had an issue. Speeds are fine if you have a ssd cache setup.
I use OMV and do prefer the new Compose plugin myself, just a couple of things to point out, there IS a stop button, in fact there is more features than Portainer has. Of course there is noting wrong with running Portainer as its only a docker container. A few advantages are that it's easier to backup your docker-compose (stacks) files, it has a global env file that has all my variables in and makes setting up compose files nice and easy. But each to their own. I do prefer OMV use of docker rather than Truenas scale, which I thought would be better. But I see more trouble with scale and I prefer to have my own compose files rather charts. I do really like OMV as I use JBOD. Looking forward to more OMV videos
I just literally did just that coupling a mini pc with Windows server 2022 and this DAS with 6*4TB HDD. I have a R/W of about 400MB/s on average and it's been working fine using storage space.
well done. it's a good idea for home lab. while doubling the cost with buying an actual NAS and use it with other devices to create a NAS. but the fun curve are better than acually using the NAS build in OS. Boooring... lol I like building truenas scale on a storage that already has RAID in it. why? because its fun and configurable as you want. wondering if multiple USB drives (just regular ol' usb HDD) can use the same technique to setup as RAID. hmm. thanks for the vid Brett.. greatly informative.
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?
I've done the same thing with a Mediasonic Probox 4 and a Mele Q3 (5105/8Gb) but rather than use OpenMediaVault, I just installed a minimal Debian 12 and setup Samba. I even went so far as to use ZFS RaidZ2 with 4 x 20Tb drives. It's not the fastest DIY NAS but it works perfectly and takes ~52-56 hours for a ZFS scrub to complete.
@@RaidOwl I saw them, but do they looks like sexy bombshells? Most work and look like reclaimed detonated bombs but cost as much as a Manhattan subway project.
I run two "used" 1 TB drives in an ORICO 4-bay HDD enclosure, in RAID0 as my "workspace/network share" drive. I run Handbrake encodes and anything else that would unnecessarily use up writes on my SSDs. They're on borrowed time, but they seem to work fine enough for what I'm using it for. All data on it can be lost and I would have a copy of it elsewhere. I'm also sharing that drive with a computer with a J4125 processor, so even worse than the 5105, and it again, works good enough for what I'm using it for. Terabytes worth of data has been written over the network onto that drive, and has run constantly for years without failure. This setup runs faster than the ethernet port can support, so I found little reason to spec beyond that, since the ethernet port on it is not upgradeable.
that omv docker change broke my setup a couple months ago and ended up pushing me to use unraid instead. I was actually using a yottamaster usb drive enclosure at the time, and never had any issues with my usb connection dropping out on me.
Same thing happened to me. My pi nas is now a backup to my unraid, I struggled to figure out what happened, I stumbled onto a random comment that gave me an idea where to start.
I am actually using a rpi4 with two 18TB MyBooks in a zfs mirror as my NAS and Plex Server. For testing I attached an old sharkoon DAS enclosure and had up to 9 drives in a raidz :D Seeing a rasberry pi using almost 100 watt was very impressive ^^
As much as I remember, you got to create a file system first ( I quick wipe every drive before using with any NAS software) and then you can create raid or mergerfs with SnapRaid.
I did this same thing with an extra Mac mini and an OWC enclosure. I connected a 10gb Ethernet adapter and I can edit video on it over the network, so I’m pretty psyched I didn’t have to go buy and learn a synology. Plus I can use the Mac mini as a local editing bay. Where I’m getting stuck is getting consistent access to it outside of my network. I’ve been using Tailscale and screens… but there’s still some hiccups. Would love to see you do a Mac mini video editing server
i am doing the same thing but with a low cost android tv box running Armbian Linux, a OWC dual bay enclosure, and a USB 3.0 cable for the 'A' to 'B' ports.
It only has a single network port. You absolutely CAN do it using VLANs and other shenanigans...but why? You can get an ARM based router-board w/ 2+ 2.5G ports that you can drop OpenWRT on so CHEAP. (And OpenWRT is perfectly acceptable in most cases) A NanoPI R5C get's you a quad-core ARM RK3568 w/ 2GiB RAM and dual 2.5Gbit ethernet for ~$50. Or, if you need x64 and you really want to work with *sense firewall/routing, you can get a USFF ex-corporate desktop for under $100. You can always slap another card into them. These mini-PCs are neat, but they are almost always a worse option than what we already have. Remember that reusing "old" stuff keeps it out of the e-waste pile.
My first attempt at a NAS was my Raspberry Pi 3B+ using Openmediavault. It was a disaster because all the ports on the Pi were USB 2.0, and the RAID5 became unreliable. It would just drop out all the time. It was also unwieldy and janky with all the cables. I was not trying to push it too hard, just trying to make it store my stuff reliably. It failed even at that.
This was entertaining as I am currently rescuing data from a Terramaster NAS. My wife picked one up for a super-low price Thinking I would like it. The NAS corrupted it's OS. It will soon be Unraid
Been running a seven usb drive raid 6 nas for the last 6 years. It's on it's third host, using webmin to manage. No idea why it's supposed to be bad. 2 backups though.
To be fair, I'm rocking a Lenovo M73 Tiny running Proxmox: inside of it I have my various LXCs as well as a VM running TrueNAS which is using a USB 3.0 external HDD :D It's been running for almost a full year now, I had no idea I could have called it a DAS :P
by the looks of that enclosure you might be able to mod it to enclose a raspberry pi and make it more of a nas, would be interesting to see even more so if you got a 10gb usb 3 adapter to work on the pi. nice LTT mousepad, I got the same one on my desk.
Fellow dumb-dumb here. I do this! Running btrfs running raid 10, usb das.. Been about 8 months, no issues. Still waiting for the day where all the articles laugh in my face. Godspeed fellow risk takers!
Haha I’m leaving a comment BEFORE I watch the video. I did something similar but completely different. A 2017 MacBook Pro with Thunderbolt 3 and an OWC 4m2 which houses 4 4tb nvme’s. The Mac OS has built in raid 0/1 and tested speeds are 1800/2400 write read speeds. A 10g ethernet would be nice but I only have 1g currently. Not bad for a pc guy stumbling around Mac OS. The macbook was 379 refurbished at micro center, and the m2 Mac mini currently running this setup was 499 at Costco.
I think unraid will work very well like this without the need to fiddle around with anything. And I dont see any downsides for this setup. Its a way to run a low powered nas.
Love it... I love this project.. I didn't know about these tiny PCs. Sheesh... now what AM I going to do with my room full of towering, electricity-devouring x86 boxes anymore? They're going the way of the horse...not so useful anymore and expensive to maintain... Dammit.
I use OMV at home; only thing i dont like: no upgrade between versions. I bought a 5-bay HDD DAS (from another mfg), so far so good. I dont need it for tons of data writing, just simple backups
I'm a broke student running a RPi 4B 8GB, with a 16GB USB stick as OMV boot drive, 128GB SD card for Docker, and planning to buy a 4TB external drive as a backup server. Probably should mirror that boot drive though.
I've been running 3 4tb external drive in raid 5 with a powered usb 3 hub for almost a year and never had any issue, maybe I'll upgrade to something like this soon this seems less stupid. Edit: I forgot to mention that I used a usb nic
I am glad docker is broken, steve from gn may have other opinions surrounding this entire setup. we could be looking at the rise of the new king for media and entertainment in the tech sector with this video
Cool video, I'd love to see what kind of uptime it gets! Also, I'm a simple smooth ape so please be patient with me... Why doesn't anyone make a device like this with mini sas connectors? I'd love a tower case with just a PSU and mini-sas connectors to live outside whatever form factor machine I want to use for my NAS. NAS cases are horrible. It's like they took the designer who flunked out of case design school and had them make a case that can't actually fit basic ATX standard hardware (like access to pcie when fullly populated with drives) and then sell it for like $250 or $400. Maybe Terramaster is the company to figure this out? Stop wth the low effort software and start making modular mini-SAS enclosures and/or some actually affordable and well designed NAS cases. How is this not a thing?
This is the best idea ever. Great video! On a second note, how is the powerconsumption of the das alone? Im still looking for a really low power diy nas solution.
Wow! Great video! Such a good idea! I always knew you were the best UA-camr ever!!! i like your financial videos, they help me on financial planning, stocks market, gold savings account, high-income invesment and stock exchanges!
i did this with Pi4 about 3 years ago using a usb hdd dock and its still running fine to this day. Although i installed OMV onto raspbian and used that for the software usb raid.
Hmmm, I don’t know how to take the hard drive out. I used the thin plastic black looking thing to act as you know that vibration whatever it’s purposes. And that hard drive wasn’t sitting properly and I had to realign it, but it seems like some of the screw holes into the system. Did you just pull? the clear plastic tab on one of the front rails allowed me to get a little leverage to get the front off but the back two were holding on pretty tight and I’m a little nervous so I just slid that plastic and slapped it down and I’m not terribly sure what I will do when eventually one of these hard drives fails and I have to replace it in my ZFS system
for that price , the mini pc and the das , you can get a normal pc and have a much better nas , can iven ad a 10gb nic most mb suport 6 drives , and most old type case suport 6 drives
I bought the Terramaster because of this video, but whenever i try create my RAID, my OMV crashes and goes into spare rebuild on one of the disks. These are brand new disks. I'm the OMV on Proxmox. Any idea of why this would happen?
i love the video. if i can Ask a question of a tangent here. i know DAS might be boring but for my use case i like it. so what do you think of teramaster Vs OWC DAS which is better i need to know because i need to piick one then get 2 8-bay units one as my daily unite use for media and the other as the back unite . so ur opinion which is better terramaster or OWC taking into consideration the unite itself and the raid pc app ????
I must be taking crazy pills but I have yet to see a single DAS / NAS / enclosure / whatever that's made for strictly SSDs. In the same footprint of that Terramaster you could probably fit 8 or more 2.5" SSDs and a USB 3.1 Gen 1/2 would be a good enough link as far as I can see.
I like your shirt.
And the duck tape. Nice touch!
What can I say, I’m a man of fine taste.
I love how far your channel has come. Your editing is growing in to a great style of its own. Keep it up dude!
I have had nothing but issues trying to use external USB enclosures with large disks (12TB each). Especially hardware RAID boxes. I finally said screw it, cut a hole in the top of the mini PC I'm using as the server, and ran an m.2 to SATA adapter card to connect to esata enclosures, foregoing USB entirely and doing software RAID. It's a frankenstein setup for sure, but ends up being more problem free in the end.
Terramaster is definitely the budget friendly home lab/backup go to, in my opinion. Even though USB is "not recommended" running ZFS, I have not encountered any issues using usb storage as the boot drive (mirrored) in my F2-423 setup, for almost over a year and a half. I have 2 of them, in my setup. One is a SSD NAS running TrueNAS Scale, NextCloud, Syncthing, Tailscale. That is used to sync my iPhone contacts & photos (iCloud ain't getting my money and data LOL), Laptops and various devices data & configs, legally obtained Plex media (Plex runs on another device and not any of the NASes), and the other NAS (HDDs) is running TrueNAS scale, Syncthing to backup the SSD NAS (Only Photos, Contacts, device data & configs. I don't waste space backing up the Plex media, if that is gone too bad). I also backup all my important data and configs to Blu-ray monthly and store the disk offsite. I had no clue Terramaster even sold a 6 bay DAS, I knew of their 6 bay NAS (that looks the same). Keep up the good work proving "da haters" wrong, that just because something is not recommended doesn't mean it doesn't work at all, and doesn't have a use case. I will let you know when I encounter problems with my USB mounted boot drives. Anyway keep on trucking my fellow Jenker.
You manage to make the most interesting videos out even a DAS! Well done many thank yous 🙏🏻 👍🏻😊
Wow! Great video! Such a good idea! I always knew you were the best UA-camr ever!!!
UA-cam algorithm. This man is not only a genius, but he’s so good at handling small things.
Hell yeah he is…wait
@@RaidOwl Your wife writing all of your scripts? ;)
@@Doesntcompute2k I bet she is even better in handling small things:)
Something like this really makes sense for a remote backup at a friend’s house. Low power, relatively cheap, and easy to stash. You have an off-site backup, and your friend’s wife doesn’t complain about an outrageously high power bill every month.
Thanks for this enlightening video!! 😂
You're welcome kind sir! :)
@@RaidOwl Like I said in the Discord, I really needed something like this today 🤣🤣🤣
Stumbled across this video and it was epic. while informative it was also funny. hope you get that high noon sponsorship you deserve it!
The article that you show (The MAC 911) is about adding multiple single usb enclosed drives to a raid setup. The issues addressed by this has nothing to do with your setup, since you are using a single DAS enclosure for all drives. This setup works perfectly. I have been running this for years without issues in a ZFS RAID-Z.
Didn’t know about the OMV USB raid trick thx for educating me
Jank is dank, I like the content. Keep up the good work 🤙
Can't stop, won't stop
This is a great idea cuz using USB give u more flexibility on what computer you can use for your server, opening options to a wide range of Mini PC with ultra low idle power (whereas these PC do not have many sata port/power for regular HDD connection). I'd also suggest SnapRaid + Mergerfs to take it to another level, giving even more flexibility. I've been using external HDD running on a random PC with samba as a file storage for a while so I approve your setup.
There's a reason OMV removed the USB option from the GUI and why it's generally recommended not to do this. Raid over USB isn't recommended because USB can and will do weird things at the worst times especially when doing things like writing a lot of data to it. You can get terramasters 4 bay NAS for about the same price as this DAS, replace the Terramaster software and have a much better system overall. For something to mess around with and experiment on no problem but it's not really a good idea for something you are going to use a lot.
Same. Even though everyone agrees it's a bad idea, I've been running OMV on a Raspberry Pi with 4 external USB drives in a powered hub for 5 years, using SnapRaid and MergeFS. Zero issues even with regular power outages.
Thanks Mate. Loved It!
This was helpful. I do video and photography. I store my backup drives (all my spare drives) in 2 towers like this terra master... sitting on my desk because they are usb. I put both tower into a closet with a raspberry pi and then watched a bunch of youtube vids on how to with pi and linux. I gave up on PI and now have ordered a used micro computer i got on ebay. Your videos have been the most helpful as to what the hell a VM, container and docker are/setting them up.
Wow! Great video! Such a good idea! I always knew you were the best UA-camr ever!!! Def would like to see a 6 month follow up.
Brett - I seriously was thinking of picking up an enclosure for my HDDs to move my NAS to a spare mini PC. Instead I decided it was better to just convert my desktop into a full-time server. Not a crazy idea to do what you did by any means.
Oh yeah for sure. That’s a way better option.
A very entertaining video ... now I will look for that 6+ month follow-up referenced.
I actually have a similar setup to this, but without RAID, and OMV is in a virtual machine under Proxmox (hard drives passthrough) in my Chinese mini PC. It's been running solid since I built it 3 or 4 months ago.
I have a Yottamaster DAS instead, which is almost 3 times cheaper (but 5 drives instead of 6). I think it's 3.2 USB as well, but I could be wrong.
I use this setup to backup my main NAS and do other things under Proxmox.
I have this same mini pc with a different DAS running unraid + plex for around 4 months with no issues. Quite a bit cheaper than most NAS and I can always add another DAS to expand the capacity.
What DAS are you using?
Thank i so enjoy your videos. I like that you are honest. Huge double thumks up for making easy to follow videos. Have damn fine day!🎉
The real treasure was the hard drives we bought along the way
“I’ll use these in something one day”
Stop looking in my box of unused hard drives! They're cold spares, I tell ya!
@@JeffGeerling I have 72 4TB enterprise drives here... WAITING for a TrueNAS home. And 20 10TB Enterprise just recertified and resectored (520 -> 512). Not to mention all of the darn Enterprise SSDs I have accumulated. I guess it's time to load up the 24 bay Dell r730xd. :) With a Raspberry Pi KVM of course!
@@Doesntcompute2k Hello new best friend! ~holds out trick or treat bag~
@@JeffGeerling haha
at least you have spares lol
I need to get a nas at some point
The Terramaster DAS is a pretty cool idea. But holy hell $300 for an disk holder? if it were 100-150 sure that is a hell of a deal, but you can buy a used case, several USB to sata adapters, and a USB hub, plug in and go for 1/4 the price. And yes build it yourself is most always going to beat buying a prebuilt, But this seems very Niche for what it is. If they cut the price in 1/2 I'm sure they'd have a hard time keeping these on the shelves for Homelabbers.
Yeah I mean 6 drives is cool but you could do something similar to this for a fraction of the cost.
I agree and I think something like this should exist. But price needs to come down. Hopefully it does. Icydock 6 bay SSD 5.25" is $80 and they do practically the same thing. @@RaidOwl
@@A77ick You are paying for the name and privilege LOL
Look for a Yottamaster with 5 drive bays instead. Costs almost 3 times cheaper and it's been working great since I bought one about 4 months ago.
Great video. I did enjoy this. Thanks for covering all of this. Love all of the content you make, @RO. One of my favorite channels. You remind me of @ByteMyBits when he first started.
I like the idea of running those tiny PC for NAS. I'd probably run JBOD instead of RAID if using USB DAS, since it might be safer as a usb drive, but then it loses redundancy of raid.
Why would running JBOD be safer than RAID?
I'm doing this with OMV on a Dell 5070 Extended with an external 5 bay eSATA enclosure, and it's been running with no issues for the last 3 months.
Great video! I was thinking for something similar to this as I'm very limited to space available. But the cost of the DAS isn't worth it imo
so Instructive and I had a few laughs. Thanks 😀
Raid Owl named his PC "Dat S" and every day is exited when he gets the alert "Time to back dat S up"
Have a DAS and a Raspberry Pi running CasaOS and it is *LEGEND*
I have the terramaster d4-300 and a t8 plus mini pc, they look great together with the silver finish, super happy with having a media server also! : D
When I think of a NAS I envisage my Raspberry Pi, its powered hub and 6 multi Terabyte USB disks. It supports SAMBR, FTP, any additional Linux functionality that I needed to add (DDNS, Rsynch, sheduled backups, auto time synch, nmon, etc etc), Internet remote access and it runs headless or connected via VNC. In total it cost me less than $100 excluding disks. (Admittedly it is rather slow, but I can stream 2 videos simultaneously so that's good enough for me.) It has worked almost flawlessly for 4 years so far and now has 20TB of disk space.
Im looking forward to the 6-month followup!
Best video ever on the UA-cam ALgorithm!
Oh wow, I was literally thinking about making a similar setup for my dad, and then this video pops up. Coincidence, or does Brett work for Big Data 🤔
Brett, what do you think about making a sort of all-in-one tech quickie style video that covers networking from top to bottom for beginners? Things like explaining what DHCP is, what a DNS is, what common terms you see in the community are like pfsense, etc. I made my first NAS following your videos almost exclusively, so I know you've already covered a lot of this in your other videos, but I think it would be nice to have it all sort of neatly compiled into a single video that a beginner with no knowledge could always reference back to as a one stop shop when they run into issues. Speaking personally as a beginner, I found your style of explanation to be funny and easy to digest, and I think the visuals you use to help explain are really helpful.
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I have been running a similar setup for about a year now. It is a Lenovo Tiny paired with a TerraMaster 5 bay DAS. I used UnRaid and haven't had any issues. People warn against it but I've never had an issue. Speeds are fine if you have a ssd cache setup.
I use OMV and do prefer the new Compose plugin myself, just a couple of things to point out, there IS a stop button, in fact there is more features than Portainer has. Of course there is noting wrong with running Portainer as its only a docker container.
A few advantages are that it's easier to backup your docker-compose (stacks) files, it has a global env file that has all my variables in and makes setting up compose files nice and easy. But each to their own. I do prefer OMV use of docker rather than Truenas scale, which I thought would be better. But I see more trouble with scale and I prefer to have my own compose files rather charts. I do really like OMV as I use JBOD. Looking forward to more OMV videos
I just literally did just that coupling a mini pc with Windows server 2022 and this DAS with 6*4TB HDD. I have a R/W of about 400MB/s on average and it's been working fine using storage space.
Great stuff, not sure if it's the hardware combination that I would choose, but hey it works let's see if it still does in 6 months
well done. it's a good idea for home lab. while doubling the cost with buying an actual NAS and use it with other devices to create a NAS. but the fun curve are better than acually using the NAS build in OS. Boooring... lol
I like building truenas scale on a storage that already has RAID in it. why? because its fun and configurable as you want.
wondering if multiple USB drives (just regular ol' usb HDD) can use the same technique to setup as RAID. hmm.
thanks for the vid Brett.. greatly informative.
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?
I've done the same thing with a Mediasonic Probox 4 and a Mele Q3 (5105/8Gb) but rather than use OpenMediaVault, I just installed a minimal Debian 12 and setup Samba. I even went so far as to use ZFS RaidZ2 with 4 x 20Tb drives. It's not the fastest DIY NAS but it works perfectly and takes ~52-56 hours for a ZFS scrub to complete.
I really appreciate this. I wish that DAS cases were NAS cases. It would make the lives of those who want a simple small footprint DIY NAS possible.
They do make NAS versions, I have a few videos on them.
@@RaidOwl I saw them, but do they looks like sexy bombshells? Most work and look like reclaimed detonated bombs but cost as much as a Manhattan subway project.
I'm using two DAS's with my DS218+, and they don't count as volumes, but... performance-wise, they're working just fine.
Yes Synology loves using them for backups.
I run two "used" 1 TB drives in an ORICO 4-bay HDD enclosure, in RAID0 as my "workspace/network share" drive.
I run Handbrake encodes and anything else that would unnecessarily use up writes on my SSDs.
They're on borrowed time, but they seem to work fine enough for what I'm using it for. All data on it can be lost and I would have a copy of it elsewhere. I'm also sharing that drive with a computer with a J4125 processor, so even worse than the 5105, and it again, works good enough for what I'm using it for. Terabytes worth of data has been written over the network onto that drive, and has run constantly for years without failure. This setup runs faster than the ethernet port can support, so I found little reason to spec beyond that, since the ethernet port on it is not upgradeable.
that omv docker change broke my setup a couple months ago and ended up pushing me to use unraid instead. I was actually using a yottamaster usb drive enclosure at the time, and never had any issues with my usb connection dropping out on me.
Idk why they changed it…
Same thing happened to me. My pi nas is now a backup to my unraid, I struggled to figure out what happened, I stumbled onto a random comment that gave me an idea where to start.
I Portainer on EVERYTHING. I learned this from Techno Tim. Good advice. Haven't noticed this about OMV but don't use it much.
I am actually using a rpi4 with two 18TB MyBooks in a zfs mirror as my NAS and Plex Server.
For testing I attached an old sharkoon DAS enclosure and had up to 9 drives in a raidz :D
Seeing a rasberry pi using almost 100 watt was very impressive ^^
reck here, SAS, fancy HP 4 years old 2699 V4, it does the job till we have NVMe level solution, or 200Gb stick in it ?
Melhor Idéia do Mundo!!! Hello from Brazil.
Loved the video. Could you try and make a zfs pool out of usb hard disks? I'd love to watch it lol
As much as I remember, you got to create a file system first ( I quick wipe every drive before using with any NAS software) and then you can create raid or mergerfs with SnapRaid.
This is the best series of bad ideas. Love it. By the way, I run a raid has on usb. No probs, but it’s not something I would professionally recommend.
this is the best idea ever.
I did this same thing with an extra Mac mini and an OWC enclosure. I connected a 10gb Ethernet adapter and I can edit video on it over the network, so I’m pretty psyched I didn’t have to go buy and learn a synology. Plus I can use the Mac mini as a local editing bay.
Where I’m getting stuck is getting consistent access to it outside of my network. I’ve been using Tailscale and screens… but there’s still some hiccups. Would love to see you do a Mac mini video editing server
The important question is: did they skimp on the PSU as usual? That's the main reason why after a few months the drives suddenly lose data.
i am doing the same thing but with a low cost android tv box running Armbian Linux, a OWC dual bay enclosure, and a USB 3.0 cable for the 'A' to 'B' ports.
THat little micro pc in your big hands is BEGGING you to install OpNsense or Pfsense and setup a router !! DO IT !!!!
It only has a single network port.
You absolutely CAN do it using VLANs and other shenanigans...but why?
You can get an ARM based router-board w/ 2+ 2.5G ports that you can drop OpenWRT on so CHEAP. (And OpenWRT is perfectly acceptable in most cases)
A NanoPI R5C get's you a quad-core ARM RK3568 w/ 2GiB RAM and dual 2.5Gbit ethernet for ~$50.
Or, if you need x64 and you really want to work with *sense firewall/routing, you can get a USFF ex-corporate desktop for under $100. You can always slap another card into them.
These mini-PCs are neat, but they are almost always a worse option than what we already have.
Remember that reusing "old" stuff keeps it out of the e-waste pile.
Would prefer is thunderbolt to a 4 bay enclosure like from OWC. That way you get far more reliability than just USB.
Wow this is the best idea EVER
This is actually a pretty smart for cold backups.
That’s an awesome idea!
first time viewer. nice style of presentation I'm subscribing
Thanks!
My first attempt at a NAS was my Raspberry Pi 3B+ using Openmediavault.
It was a disaster because all the ports on the Pi were USB 2.0, and the RAID5 became unreliable. It would just drop out all the time. It was also unwieldy and janky with all the cables. I was not trying to push it too hard, just trying to make it store my stuff reliably. It failed even at that.
This was entertaining as I am currently rescuing data from a Terramaster NAS. My wife picked one up for a super-low price Thinking I would like it. The NAS corrupted it's OS. It will soon be Unraid
Been running a seven usb drive raid 6 nas for the last 6 years. It's on it's third host, using webmin to manage. No idea why it's supposed to be bad. 2 backups though.
To be fair, I'm rocking a Lenovo M73 Tiny running Proxmox: inside of it I have my various LXCs as well as a VM running TrueNAS which is using a USB 3.0 external HDD :D
It's been running for almost a full year now, I had no idea I could have called it a DAS :P
This is the best idea ever :)
by the looks of that enclosure you might be able to mod it to enclose a raspberry pi and make it more of a nas, would be interesting to see even more so if you got a 10gb usb 3 adapter to work on the pi. nice LTT mousepad, I got the same one on my desk.
Fellow dumb-dumb here. I do this! Running btrfs running raid 10, usb das.. Been about 8 months, no issues. Still waiting for the day where all the articles laugh in my face. Godspeed fellow risk takers!
Came here for the NAS. Stayed for the laughs
Haha I’m leaving a comment BEFORE I watch the video. I did something similar but completely different. A 2017 MacBook Pro with Thunderbolt 3 and an OWC 4m2 which houses 4 4tb nvme’s. The Mac OS has built in raid 0/1 and tested speeds are 1800/2400 write read speeds. A 10g ethernet would be nice but I only have 1g currently. Not bad for a pc guy stumbling around Mac OS. The macbook was 379 refurbished at micro center, and the m2 Mac mini currently running this setup was 499 at Costco.
best idea
Dropped a like for the "dated bootstrap" theme joke :'D
Great video
I think unraid will work very well like this without the need to fiddle around with anything. And I dont see any downsides for this setup. Its a way to run a low powered nas.
Love it... I love this project.. I didn't know about these tiny PCs. Sheesh... now what AM I going to do with my room full of towering, electricity-devouring x86 boxes anymore? They're going the way of the horse...not so useful anymore and expensive to maintain... Dammit.
I have a terramaster 2bay has running TrueNAS. I also have one of their DAS that I may end up connecting to it.
I use OMV at home; only thing i dont like: no upgrade between versions.
I bought a 5-bay HDD DAS (from another mfg), so far so good. I dont need it for tons of data writing, just simple backups
I'm a broke student running a RPi 4B 8GB, with a 16GB USB stick as OMV boot drive, 128GB SD card for Docker, and planning to buy a 4TB external drive as a backup server. Probably should mirror that boot drive though.
I've been running 3 4tb external drive in raid 5 with a powered usb 3 hub for almost a year and never had any issue, maybe I'll upgrade to something like this soon this seems less stupid. Edit: I forgot to mention that I used a usb nic
I am glad docker is broken, steve from gn may have other opinions surrounding this entire setup. we could be looking at the rise of the new king for media and entertainment in the tech sector with this video
What do you mean you are glad? (Actual question)
And is the rest of your post just stirring up drama? If so...stop it.
Cool video, I'd love to see what kind of uptime it gets! Also, I'm a simple smooth ape so please be patient with me... Why doesn't anyone make a device like this with mini sas connectors? I'd love a tower case with just a PSU and mini-sas connectors to live outside whatever form factor machine I want to use for my NAS. NAS cases are horrible. It's like they took the designer who flunked out of case design school and had them make a case that can't actually fit basic ATX standard hardware (like access to pcie when fullly populated with drives) and then sell it for like $250 or $400. Maybe Terramaster is the company to figure this out? Stop wth the low effort software and start making modular mini-SAS enclosures and/or some actually affordable and well designed NAS cases. How is this not a thing?
Probably cost. Not enough demand to justify it. I think it would be pretty cool though.
This is the best idea ever. Great video!
On a second note, how is the powerconsumption of the das alone?
Im still looking for a really low power diy nas solution.
The DAS is just a backplane and two fans so probably like 3-5W
Can the ORICO 2 Bay or 4 bay drive enclosure work with mini pc on true nas core
Im actually in the process of doing this same thing. I got a 1L lenovo and have been looking for a way to attach hdds to it.
finally a funny,
NOT cringy tech UA-camr
Wow! Great video! Such a good idea! I always knew you were the best UA-camr ever!!!
i like your financial videos, they help me on financial planning, stocks market, gold savings account, high-income invesment and stock exchanges!
My man using NAS... #RESPECT "God's son" across the belly, I prove you lost already The king is back, where my crown at? 🎶🎵🎼
i did this with Pi4 about 3 years ago using a usb hdd dock and its still running fine to this day. Although i installed OMV onto raspbian and used that for the software usb raid.
A like, because self hosting is best paired with self deprecation.
🧑💻*Chef's Kiss*🧑🍳
"I know what super tiny is" bruh moment
I have an old NUC Hades Cayon I’m using with that enclosure to make a TrueNAS, wish me luck
That’s primarily a back up for my iXsystem … and I already had the NUC … with 42GB of RAM and 2 NVMes
Hmmm, I don’t know how to take the hard drive out. I used the thin plastic black looking thing to act as you know that vibration whatever it’s purposes. And that hard drive wasn’t sitting properly and I had to realign it, but it seems like some of the screw holes into the system. Did you just pull? the clear plastic tab on one of the front rails allowed me to get a little leverage to get the front off but the back two were holding on pretty tight and I’m a little nervous so I just slid that plastic and slapped it down and I’m not terribly sure what I will do when eventually one of these hard drives fails and I have to replace it in my ZFS system
how do we recover NAS setup\data if the PC damage or the OS is corrupted?
I’m just here to assert my nerdy dominance
for that price , the mini pc and the das , you can get a normal pc and have a much better nas , can iven ad a 10gb nic most mb suport 6 drives , and most old type case suport 6 drives
I bought the Terramaster because of this video, but whenever i try create my RAID, my OMV crashes and goes into spare rebuild on one of the disks. These are brand new disks. I'm the OMV on Proxmox. Any idea of why this would happen?
why not dual usbc cable,or a 10gb switch
i love the video. if i can Ask a question of a tangent here. i know DAS might be boring but for my use case i like it. so what do you think of teramaster Vs OWC DAS which is better i need to know because i need to piick one then get 2 8-bay units one as my daily unite use for media and the other as the back unite . so ur opinion which is better terramaster or OWC taking into consideration the unite itself and the raid pc app ????
I mean the terramaster worked great so I’d go with that
I must be taking crazy pills but I have yet to see a single DAS / NAS / enclosure / whatever that's made for strictly SSDs. In the same footprint of that Terramaster you could probably fit 8 or more 2.5" SSDs and a USB 3.1 Gen 1/2 would be a good enough link as far as I can see.