Discussion External HDD Enclosure Recommendations

[Tonyblu331]

Hello,

I own an NCASE M1 and I want to maximize my case real state to its maximum for cooling but I have two 3.5in HDD that are essential for my work. So anyone can recommend me any affordable external HDD enclosure to plug my drives?

Thanks!

 

[darksable]

If these drives contain critical work data, you do not want them to go into an external caddie. They simply aren't reliable enough, and have a terrible failure rate.

The 'proper' way of doing this is to buy a small NAS - and preferably two extra drives so that you can use Raid 1, Raid 5, or ZFS to give you data parity, so that even when a hard drive fails, you don't lose your data. (and remember, it is a when, not an if.)

 

[Tonyblu331]

Any small NAS that you can recommend?

 

[Phuncz]

I recommend @darksable 's recommendation of offloading drives to a dedicated NAS because you mention "essential for work".

Let's consider that data is important that it costs you either money (indirectly), grief or time when you lose data. How much would that be worth to not have to deal with ? Be realistic and try to envision a scenario where you lose that data and how much you're willing to pay to get that data back. That'll be your max budget

To keep your data safe, you want atleast to consider atleast two points:
1. resilience: your data survives a common hard drive failure.
2. backup: your data survives an unwanted change, a cryptolocker encrypting all your data or a massive failure.

A NAS solves the first point and facilitates the second one. Most NAS'es support RAID1, 10, 5 or 6 allowing your data to survive atleast one drive failure depending on how much drives and net storage space you want to dedicate to this resilience.

The second issue can be solved in multiple ways. You basically want atleast one copy of your data on another device or somewhere else (known as "off-site backup"). You can use either an external (single) drive attached to the NAS, another NAS system (in the house, at a family member's or friend's house) or "in the cloud". Most NAS'es support a cloud backup integrated solution but it costs money to keep your data there.

Synology, QNAP, AsuStor are a few vendors of ready to use NAS systems that just require drives and setup, here are some models from each for 4x 3,5" drives:
https://www.synology.com/en-uk/products/DS418
https://www.qnap.com/en-us/product/ts-453d
https://www.asustor.com/en-gb/product?p_id=57

Or if you like a challenge, you can roll your own. Check my PowerMac G5 and Silverstone CS01S-HS builds in my signature below. But I don't recommend this without a reasonable amount of knowledge in networking, storage and Linux.

 

[gustav]

There is also a possibilty to build it by yourself: e.g. Asrock J4105-ITX & FreeNAS - but it's not a ready-to-go-solution. There is many to apply to it, till it works as you wish.

 

[ermac318]

If you've never done anything with a NAS before, buying an inexpensive Synology or QNAP is highly recommended. If you don't have that much data to back up, a 2-drive mirror is all you need.

 

[dKenGuru]

Raspberry Pi 4 4/8Gb + OMV + HDD Enclose like Orico. It's simple, cheap and fast home NAS.
ZFS is useless for home usage.

 

[Phuncz]

Raspberry Pi 4 4/8Gb + OMV + HDD Enclose like Orico. It's simple, cheap and fast home NAS.
ZFS is useless for home usage.

That's just bad info. What you recommend is a solution that just a bunch of loose components connected over USB and in the end will not cost much less than a proper NAS. Your ZFS comment is just ignorant.

 

[dKenGuru]

USB 3.0. What a problem?
Why you need ZFS at home?

I offer case like this 3.5-Inch Multi-Bay Hard Drive Enclosure-ORICO - USB Storage Adapters, Chargers, Hubs, and More also variants with RAID available.

 

[gustav]

That's just bad info. What you recommend is a solution that just a bunch of loose components connected over USB and in the end will not cost much less than a proper NAS. Your ZFS comment is just ignorant.

I think he was trying to show the possibilities to build a NAS.
It's not that wrong, it may just be not sufficient enough for the needs. And ZFS for @home is overpowered. Then you have to deal for example with SMR on WD drives, etc.

The point I try to tell is: ZFS is adding complexity to the build, where you have to look for proper components

On the other hand, RAID1/5/10 is possible with any of those solutions. They all are software-based in QNAP and Synology NAS devices but also when building your own using mdadm.

And do not forget, RAID does not replace frequent backups.

When buying a ready-to-go NAS you pay for the name and webui. When you're on budget, a Rpi4 build is ok. I was/am running it myself.

Rpi4 has 2 drives connected, (which are WD4TB, SMR drives) and serves the share over NFS to my other Proxmox instance. This instance has VM's which run from the NFS share.

Additionally there is a samba share on the rpi4 for windows clients as a NAS.

It's fine for me. With ext4/RAID1/mdadm still hitting over 100MB/s in each direction

When your drive is SMR-based it may have troubles restoring a degraded ZFS partition

The workaround for bit rotting (which ZFS takes care of) are hashes. Create a cron job, which makes hashes of your files and periodically verify if a hash has changed. Then you know, there is something bad. Create/Verify hashes when making your regular backups.

Or buy yourself a ready-to-go NAS and configure it over the webui you paid for. Many of those products are build on the same platform. The UI differs, and this is overpriced (as I think). I was trying to buy a NAS, but they are so expensive providing only a ARM cpu where you could not even do any VM in.
If you gonna buy a x86 NAS - you will have to expand the RAM and be careful using WD drives in ZFS (ZFS likes also RAM). But for the same model going from ARM to x86 will add like +100$ to the costs of the device.

Therefore I built mine with Rpi4/2GB

https://www.qnap.com/en/product/ts-251+ -- this one is x86/2GB, costs around 350€
https://www.synology.com/en-global/products/DS218 -- this one is ARM/2GB, costs around 250€
WD not ZFS-safe, so take RAID in account
Rpi4/4GB costs around 70€ (with power supply) + external drive cases (~ 2x 30€) + system-software/config (free) = ~130€
Asrock J4105-ITX + RAM + Case & FreeNAS would be also ~200€ project, but you would have up to 4 realiable S-ATA ports.

There are some good HDD cases, like Fantec DB-AluSky U3 6G 3.5" (8,89cm) USB 3.0 featuring the ASM1051E for example, which can report SMART values, but also power down the HDD and spin in back online. The compatability is there - you just have to know where look for. In case of SMART it's 'smartmontools' or more exaclty 'smartctl'. You can use this tool in your cron jobs to e.g. report values via e-mail. For e-mail you can use postfix. Or skip this all and buy a NAS

What is your usecase, @Tonyblu331 like: do you work with large files, like 100MB+ or are those many small files?
So yea, there are possibilities.

But I think ready-to-go NAS is more easy to setup / sufficient as they provide built-in S-ATA controller and are more suitable for critical operations.

Here is small benchmark of mine not-that-critical setup, those enclosures I have are running 24/7 and are almost 2 years old:

 

[Phuncz]

USB 3.0. What a problem?
Why you need ZFS at home?

I offer case like this 3.5-Inch Multi-Bay Hard Drive Enclosure-ORICO - USB Storage Adapters, Chargers, Hubs, and More also variants with RAID available.

The problem with your suggestion is that it isn't simpler or faster than a suggested barebones NAS, just cheaper if you are able to get the enclosure cheaper. You said ZFS is useless for home usage, while the topic starter mentions that the storage is essential for his work. I put the data integrity at a higher tier than casual domestic usage.

I think he was trying to show the possibilities to build a NAS.
It's not that wrong, it may just be not sufficient enough for the needs. And ZFS for @home is overpowered. Then you have to deal for example with SMR on WD drives, etc.

The point I try to tell is: ZFS is adding complexity to the build, where you have to look for proper components

No one is pushing ZFS here, but it isn't a bad solution. ZFS at home is overpowered if you merely need it for data you can live without. SMR drives are a worry you need to deal with on ALL platforms, it's just amplified with ZFS when using redundant arrays. I have an SMR drive formatted in UFS and even that isn't reliable performance-wise.

On the other hand, RAID1/5/10 is possible with any of those solutions. They all are software-based in QNAP and Synology NAS devices but also when building your own using mdadm.

And do not forget, RAID does not replace frequent backups.

When buying a ready-to-go NAS you pay for the name and webui. When you're on budget, a Rpi4 build is ok. I was/am running it myself.

Rpi4 has 2 drives connected, (which are WD4TB, SMR drives) and serves the share over NFS to my other Proxmox instance. This instance has VM's which run from the NFS share.

Additionally there is a samba share on the rpi4 for windows clients as a NAS.

It's fine for me. With ext4/RAID1/mdadm still hitting over 100MB/s in each direction

When your drive is SMR-based it may have troubles restoring a degraded ZFS partition

The workaround for bit rotting (which ZFS takes care of) are hashes. Create a cron job, which makes hashes of your files and periodically verify if a hash has changed. Then you know, there is something bad. Create/Verify hashes when making your regular backups.

Or buy yourself a ready-to-go NAS and configure it over the webui you paid for. Many of those products are build on the same platform. The UI differs, and this is overpriced (as I think). I was trying to buy a NAS, but they are so expensive providing only a ARM cpu where you could not even do any VM in.
If you gonna buy a x86 NAS - you will have to expand the RAM and be careful using WD drives in ZFS (ZFS likes also RAM). But for the same model going from ARM to x86 will add like +100$ to the costs of the device.

Therefore I built mine with Rpi4/2GB

https://www.qnap.com/en/product/ts-251+ -- this one is x86/2GB, costs around 350€
https://www.synology.com/en-global/products/DS218 -- this one is ARM/2GB, costs around 250€
WD not ZFS-safe, so take RAID in account
Rpi4/4GB costs around 70€ (with power supply) + external drive cases (~ 2x 30€) + system-software/config (free) = ~130€
Asrock J4105-ITX + RAM + Case & FreeNAS would be also ~200€ project, but you would have up to 4 realiable S-ATA ports.

There are some good HDD cases, like Fantec DB-AluSky U3 6G 3.5" (8,89cm) USB 3.0 featuring the ASM1051E for example, which can report SMART values, but also power down the HDD and spin in back online. The compatability is there - you just have to know where look for. In case of SMART it's 'smartmontools' or more exaclty 'smartctl'. You can use this tool in your cron jobs to e.g. report values via e-mail. For e-mail you can use postfix. Or skip this all and buy a NAS

What is your usecase, @Tonyblu331 like: do you work with large files, like 100MB+ or are those many small files?
So yea, there are possibilities.

But I think ready-to-go NAS is more easy to setup / sufficient as they provide built-in S-ATA controller and are more suitable for critical operations.

Here is small benchmark of mine not-that-critical setup, those enclosures I have are running 24/7 and are almost 2 years old:

While I agree with most of your points, you are looking at some aspects in a vacuum instead of the whole. For instance not everyone is adept at Linux or BSD. I've been fiddling with it for a decade and I still feel like a total newb.

Your benchmark captures best-case with a small test file that can fit in the RAM as well as (partially) in the storage cache. I'd recommend using a test file of atleast 50GB over network. SMR drives will also start to cave in on performance when they need to "repave the shingles", my SMR drive also didn't exhibit issues until I started filling them more.

 

[gustav]

Thanks for your answer.

I did not think about caching, you're right! (Had thought of additional SSD-Caching based on usecase tho, some NAS devices provide M.2 slot)
I also agree on that the example was for large files, that's why I was asking for usecase.. the speed can also break down, I agree.
Kinda "your mileage may vary" based on scenarion. (I did not experience any SMR-based break downs, but it may be the fact because I wrote them once with 1TB chunk of data, and what I add/delete afterwards is <20GB each, so yea I did not test it after the SMR-news went around)

I understand, it may sound like I was pushing towards solution based on Rpi4 - it was just to give an overview, abilities / possibilities.
And Linux is a way more customizable/complex than what a regular user is used to, the learning curve is expotentional, and I feel myself as much as you in that regard

But again, if I have to store some critical data, my business relies on - I would invest into ZFS and the right (enterprise-class) components! Fully agree with you.

 

[ermac318]

For someone's very first NAS, I would never recommend building it from scratch with ARM-based components. There's so many levels of DIY-hackiness there it's not a good recommendation for someone with business-critical things.

If he were trying to put together a NAS for home photos or videography or something, and he was interesting in putting in all the extra time and effort to research how to do all this stuff, then maybe.

But buying a cheap 2-drive unit with a web interface that works out of the box and comes with support shouldn't be underrated.

 

[gustav]

Well, we all started somewhere

I do think ARM-based NAS have a place to be, not everyone needs VMs and such. This is good point you make there: support.
Support and WebUI - this is the extra money you pay for. But also there such a small device unleashes it's potential.
But still some proper drives should be considered about if he wants to go either way.

This could be interesting in that regard: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-hard-drive-stats-q1-2019/ just as an example.