What is Reddit's opinion of Sabrent USB 3.2 4-Bay 3.5" SATA Hard Drive Tray-Less Docking Station (DS-SC4B)?

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I love Synology but if you're just looking for a simple machine to store data and not run VM's and Dockers you can certainly spend less. I use a little i3 NUC and a Sabrent USB 4 Bay Enclosure. I turn it on once a month, backup for 8 hours, and turn it off. Mine is a 4-bay that I had laying around. I actually did try the 10 Bay but I was pretty disappointed by the speeds and sent it back.

NUC's are often overpriced, but if you can find slightly older HP EliteDesk mini's for super cheap and real low power consumption. I was a 6500T model for my HomeAssistant server.

For reference, I bought one of these and the individual power switches allow me to completely switch off (thus avoiding u/CupaThaCreepa's concerns) and remove a drive without interrupting any others.

Nah, I don't use Plex, I don't even know wtf tone mapping is, but if it requires the GPU encode chip to do it, you are job locked to two jobs in parallel.

More and more USB3.1/g2 or USB3.2 external cases for hard drives come out all the time, just need to buy one for the number of drives you want to use. Something like this. Note: I've never used that product, it might be a heap of shit for all I know, just using it as an example.

You don't see too many TB3 disk enclosures yet, but I know for a fact you can get a TB3->External PCI-E slot box if you needed an extra slot. Or, if you need a lot of extra slots, just get a larger motherboard. I suggested Mini-ITX to keep it small.

No, I would not recommend that enclosure. It is a very different beast from what I suggested.

Look for the brand Sabrent. I believe that is the name Icy Box sell under in the US.

https://www.amazon.com/Sabrent-Tray-Less-Docking-Station-DS-SC5B/dp/B07Y3WDHLD

Ok that makes sense, first thing that popped up was this https://www.amazon.com/Sabrent-Tray-Less-Docking-Station-DS-SC4B/dp/B07Y3WDHLD/ref=sr_1_5?keywords=4+bay+hard+drive+docking+station&qid=1653598684&s=electronics&sprefix=4+bay+%2Celectronics%2C71&sr=1-5

Thank you kindly for your reply. I had not seen these USB enclosures. I'm now looking at this one. Can they be RAIDed in this external / USB configuration? Seems like a great option.

And thank you for the tip on needing to reformat, like I said to the user above, it wasn't something I was considering but seems obvious now since it's entering a new OS.

Raid 1 with 4 drives? You want 4 copies of the same data?

Sigh.

OK.

You could get something like this: https://www.amazon.com/Sabrent-Tray-Less-Docking-Station-DS-SC4B/dp/B07Y3WDHLD/ref=sr_1_4?keywords=4+bay+hard+drive+enclosure&qid=1648185612&sr=8-4

Then on linux set up ZFS and use a 4 disk mirror vdev. Then any THREE disks could fail and your data should be safe. It will be slow however, especially on write as four copies of the data have to go through that USB connection.

I have the Studio on order, and am moving from a large tower PC with 4 3.5” HDDs myself. So I ordered this in hopes that it works well, price was right and didn’t need any bells and whistles aside from just drive access: Sabrent USB 3.2 4-Bay 3.5" SATA Hard Drive Tray-Less Docking Station (DS-SC4B) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07Y3WDHLD/

Hey - thanks for the reply. The enclosure is a Sabrent USB 3.2 4-Bay. I do some audio editing for film, so i might be storing files up to 1gb.

I'll take a look into the micro server - many thanks for the recommendation!

Probably overkill, but I use one of these:

https://www.amazon.com.au/Sabrent-Tray-Less-Docking-Station-DS-SC4B/dp/B07Y3WDHLD

For your use case, I’d just keep the drives in there and turn them on when you want to copy/test (you can turn on each drive individually).

Here's the enclosure:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07Y3WDHLD/ref=cm_sw_r_u_apa_fabc_WJ21B3ME1JDKPT31D0KW?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1

Very happy with the construction and it makes very little fan noise while keeping the drives plenty cool. I bought 4 External 10TB Western Digital drives and shucked them. They run much cooler in this thing than in their original husks.

For the NUC I wanted something that supports a fair bit of QuickSync, so I went with the Nuc10i7, slapped 64 GB of RAM in there (mostly for VMs) and it never breaks a sweat!

You are 10hrs too late lol. I already order my case but it's a great idea! I already try NAS and hate it. But you gave me the idea of return it and change it for a smaller case and add this:

https://www.amazon.ca/Sabrent-Tray-Less-Docking-Station-DS-SC4B/dp/B07Y3WDHLD/ref=sr_1_98_sspa?keywords=External+Multiple+Hard+Drive+Enclosure&qid=1658497279&sr=8-98-spons&psc=1&spLa=ZW5jcnlwdGVkUXVhbGlmaWVyPUEzVEk1V1hKQ1FLQklMJmVuY3J5cHRlZElkPUEwMjAyMjMyMVE5TzVGUVpBS1NVRiZlbmNyeXB0ZWRBZElkPUEwMzkwMTQ4UUxZSTQ5OUFTMkRRJndpZGdldE5hbWU9c3BfYXRmX25leHQmYWN0aW9uPWNsaWNrUmVkaXJlY3QmZG9Ob3RMb2dDbGljaz10cnVl

The case i order is a Corsair D7000 Airflow. I like it but it's a bit big. I choose it because it's the only one who can hold 5-6 HDD and have good airflow... Do you think i should return it, buy a smaller case and add the Docking station? Thanks a lot for the tips!

DAS, direct attached storage, is the term you're looking for, but often they're just labeled as a "dock" or "docking station", like this one.

You can also get something like this that just holds, powers, and cools 4 drives, but then your output is 4 sata ports. If you want to case to combine the drives into a single interface, whether ethernet, USB, or Thunderbolt, you need at least a small computer in there.

Not OP but this one has been rock solid for me:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07Y3WDHLD

I used to run everything in one Synology box, but after moving Plex to its own server, I'll never go back to a single box. My use case is super simple: network storage (duh), backing up docs, and media. Have a J series NAS now, super cheap, works great, crazy efficient on power and it has handled everything I've thrown at it. I had a spare Intel NUC lying around, so I put Ubuntu server on it, installed PMS, mounted the media shares on it, and when I need transcoding (which I mostly avoid), handles it like a beast. Another advantage to having two servers is you can also independently upgrade or modify either box to suit your growing/expanding needs, instead of being "trapped" inside a single (very expensive) box. My brother did the same thing, except he didn't have a spare NUC lying around, so he went to eBay and bought a used Dell Optiplex 9010 for like $100, and then did the same thing I did.

And recently over at r/datahoarders I read a super affordable kind of quirky way to do big storage for Plex: snag a big USB enclosure, shuck a bunch external drives, then link them all up with Stablebit's Drive Pool utility application, and off you go. So if you want Plex but don't care about the rest of what a NAS box can do, that's the way to go, I think.