Right now my home server consists of a thinkcentre tiny and a single 6tb usb3 external drive.
The goal is to eventually build out a nas, but that’s not in my budget at the moment.
Is there some kind of external device I can put multiple 3.5inch drives, has plenty of bandwidth for said drives, and routes through either usb3 or C and can potentially allow me to have a raid (or raid similar) setup for redundancy for the data?
I have a JBOD SATA USB-C enclosure that can do eight drives and has a fan. I’ll follow up with the name in twenty minutes or so; not by it at the moment.
It took me a while to find it when I got it, because my previous JBOD USB-C enclosure — as with, apparently, most enclosures — didn’t have the ability to power back up on power loss without the power-on button being pushed. This has a mechanical button that locks in and doesn’t have that issue. If that’s something that would matter to you, I’d look for that when making a purchase.
It’s not a hardware RAID enclosure, but if you’re using it on a Linux system, you can set up RAID in software on that.
EDIT:
https://www.amazon.com/Syba-Swappable-Drive-External-Enclosure/dp/B0DCDDGHMJ
Also, follow-up point, but if you don’t have a backup already, I’d do that and then if you still want a RAID setup for data redundancy on top of that to reduce downtime in the event of a failure, do that then. RAID won’t guard against some issues that a backup will.
Nice, yeah I’m just running Debian server on it, good looking out on the power thing, please do let me know when you get back to it :)