[exar0815]

In all honesty, and considering that everything you build with a SBC is not that powerful and a cabling mess, I would recommend to go for a refurbished ThinkCenter Tiny or similar + an external HDD Rack. Atleast thats the route I went, and I am vastly less annoyed about it.

[voidUpdate]

I got a small thinkcenter a while back that I currently run some docker stuff on (homeassistant, pihole, some custom stuff), and I am pretty happy with it. Do they have a spare pcie or something to attach all the drives to, though? I don't remember seeing anything like that when I was inside mine, though that was a while back, so my memory may be wrong

[exar0815]

In theory you can use the WiFi-One, though I don't know if that one is BIOS-locked. I just use it with USB3 and a 4 Bay Enclosure, which probably someone is gonna explain to me is the worst idea since leaded gasoline, but I have absolutely no Issues with my ZFS NAS for 5 years that way.

[babarjaana]

Over on reddit I once floated a similar idea but everyone exclaimed that USB enclosures sucks and you should not use them at all. Now technically you could - with some PCIe expansion cards - connect SAS/SATA HDDs to the ports on your mini/SFF PC, but then you need an enclosure for holding, powering and cooling the disks. Holding and cooling is simple enough and there's enclosures on AliExpress that cost like 10 bucks that do it for you, but you'd still need a PSU outside of the PC to power the disks. At that point the USB enclosure starts looking even more enticing.

Which one are you using right now? There's some brands out there that are considered really bad by the community.

[exar0815]

A 4-Bay one from Amazon, Icy-Box. Pretty Cheap. I decided on external Backup over Enterprise-Hardware. YMMV though.

https://www.amazon.de/ICY-BOX-Externes-Festplatten-Aluminium...

[voidUpdate]

Ah, good point, I hadn't considered a USB solution. I might look into that, though I'll have to see if there's a good way to keep all the cables looking tidy and not have a cable coming out the front and then disappearing back inside again haha

[exar0815]

I cut some kind of DIY-Rack on my Laser Cutter from Plywood, because I couldn't get it stored better in any way.

https://i.ibb.co/XWKDmwS/IMG-20241127-134555-527.jpg

[rvense]

Which enclosure? I've got an upgrade on the horizon and like this solution.

[exar0815]

A 4-Bay one from Amazon, Icy-Box. Pretty Cheap. I decided on external Backup over Enterprise-Hardware. YMMV though.

https://www.amazon.de/ICY-BOX-Externes-Festplatten-Aluminium...

[kalleboo]

Some of the models do - I have the M720q and it has a small form factor PCIe 8x slot on the motherboard, but you need a proprietary riser board (cheap on aliexpress) to convert it to a real PCIe slot, and it takes the place of the internal SATA drive cage and rear port adapters (VGA or serial or what have you) so you can't use those.

I'm using mine as an OpenWRT router with a dual 10 Gbe ethernet card in the PCIe slot ever since I got 10 Gbit internet at home and consumer 10 Gbit routers are expensive and leave a bit to be desired