I have the QNAP TL-D800S. It’s an 8 bay DAS but there is also a 4 bay variant. Works well for me. It uses SFF cables to connect to the PC and comes with the appropriate PCIe card which seems more robust to me than anything USB for this.

If you use a reputable brand, such as TerraMaster you’ll avoid all of the scare stories you hear.

Almost everything bad seems to be along the lines of

I bought “off brand” XzzYyG from Amazon/EBay/Wish and it failed

Something like this:

https://www.terra-master.com/uk/products/homesoho-das/d6-320.html

It’ll be faster than your spinning rust anyway, as long as you have high speed ports on your mini PC.

I built my own and it honestly wasn’t that expensive (at the time back in 2018). I just started with the basics but built it to be expandable. I used a Define 6 case which gave me room for 12 HDDs, a mobo with the highest number of SATA ports, processor, RAM, etc and then just added drives 1-2 at a time as they filled up. My only regret is that I didn’t and still haven’t learned Linux well enough to rely on it because it runs Windows, the PC is showing its age now, and I need to think about the replacement solution and how I’ll be able to migrate 70+ TB of media and all my configurations to the new machine.

If you do run Windows, Drivepool and SnapRAID are useful for pooling everything into a single virtual disk and setting up a software RAID that will protect from drive failures without locking your data away.

I had a setup similar to this for a year or two that ended with an hdd destroying itself one night. Probably because of the drive and not the usb enclosure I was using. Until then it worked fine, it’s definitely a viable route.

If you can swing a desktop pc case it’ll probably end up easier and cheaper and have some headroom for upgrades, that’s the route I went down after trying an escalating series of mini-pcs and running into their limits one too many times.

Did that for 3 years. Not pretty but it worked

I use an M1 Mac Mini running Asahi Linux with a USB 3.0 4-bay enclosure. Works great so far.

I have used mini PCs as a servers for years with file serving being a major duty of them. Granted my storage needs aren’t excessive, but most NUCs or Nuc-likes can hold two drives, some can have a third if you include 2.5" drives. My AsRock A300 can hold 4 drives (two of each), but its m.2 support sucks so that’s not as much of a boon as it sounds. If you need significant storage, there is no replacement for something that can hold 3.5" drives though since those can now reach 20+ GB a drive.

I would either get a used HP Proliant microserver Gen 8 (I own one. Pretty sweet) or get a mini ITX nas case, 4 or more bays. Depending on USB doesn’t seem like a good idea to me. You can always sell your mini PC. I have slowly learned to avoid the sunk cost fallacy.

Get old HP thinclient T510, or Igel M340C. Got a few of those practically free online. Has Via Eden 1.2Ghz 2 core. Not powerful at all. But cold. Mine runs on hot summer days approximately between 40-50C. HP has I think 19V power source, Igel runs on 12V brick.

Get a USB-C DAS (enclosure) for your disks, those use their own power supply. Since it is USB-C performance will be very good and stable and you’ll be happy with it.

I am currently getting a replacement for my old win10+drivepool setup using hand me down parts from my old main pc. I decided to go with UNRAID this time and other than a few headaches, its been pretty simple to get going. I am already a big fan of the container/docker/app setup. My setup is 3 12tb seagate iron wolf nas drives recertified/refurbished from ebay, the nvme ssd I used as my prior boot drive as a cache drive, and a r7 1700 and ab350m pro 4 mobo with a pny xlr8 1070gpu. It was mostly free since I was replacing it with a newer gaming build. I think I spent $280 on the hdds?

Doing it now with a not so mini second hand pc

There are small SATA backplanes that allow you to fit 3 HDDs into two 5.25" slots (or 4 HDDs in 3 slots). You can find used ones for cheap (mine was 30€), and with some cheap tower case you could get something NAS-like with hot-swap drive bays for way cheaper

I use a couple of mini pcs in exactly the setup you are talking about. Only downside is throughput. Anything built in is gonna be faster for read write ops, but usb3 is plenty fast for most things including media and data sync. I run Ubuntu with ZFS, and created raid arrays for data redundancy. It works really well. I virtualize using Incus with docker inside of those tiny VMs. It’s awesome.

You may not be able to do RAID or other redundant/performant arrays with USB. You can definitely achieve a big JBOD array but it will be less resilient and slower than a RAID array. Enclosures often don’t cool as well so heat may degrade your disks faster as well. I did this for a while with some old disks and some $30 HDD toasters. I only put data on there I could afford to lose. I wish there was a standalone hardware RAID solution… like a NAS without the network. That would have a huge draw for hobbyists that don’t want to buy an expensive NAS. I’ve searched for this but haven’t found anything. Message me if you know of such a product! Maybe consider building your own NAS with an old PC. Way cheaper than a prebuilt and fun to build! I had an old Dell Optiplex 990 that is now a 32 TB NAS. Had to get a new case but it’s a decent backup to my Synology.