Thought this might be helpful as a lot of these mini PCs are hitting the used market.

  • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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    1 month ago

    Yeah, I don’t understand why JBOD with a decent chipset is so hard to find. I really don’t expect much from it, I just want to slide some drives in and have everything run consistently for a few months at a time. I’ll power cycle periodically to apply updates, so I’m not looking for 24/7/365 operation or anything.

    FWIW, Level1Techs seems to recommend MediaSonic (timestamp is where he talks about reliability), but doesn’t give it a ringing endorsement. And that was one of the better ones he’s seen…

    After a bunch of research, what I’ve found is:

    • okay chipset, but garbage build quality (no dampening for drives, no hot-swap, etc)
    • fancy controller that doesn’t support JBOD - non-starter for me, I don’t want anything to do with hw controllers
    • expensive - at a certain point, I’ll just keep my oversized ATX case that does the job

    Now I’m looking for compact cases that support 5 drives, like this one (a little too cheap perhaps?) or this one. It just seems reliable 4-5 bay USB-C enclosures just aren’t that popular.