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?
Yeah, you can get external USB enclosures for multiple drives, and set up software RAID.
I wouldn’t recommend it, though, because if the connection is interrupted at all, one or more disks can drop off and the array is degraded or failed, which can lead to degraded performance during rebuild at best, or a loss of some or all data at worst.
Which part wouldn’t you recommend, raid on those or just the type of product in general?
Anything over USB.
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 :)
