I am assuming each drive shows up as an independent drive that you can raid up however you want in software?

Yeah, each drive is shown as if they were individually attached the machine. RAID how you want (or don’t). I’ve got three 4TB drives in an 8TB RAID5, one 4TB that contains data from my gaming PC that I’m working on moving to the RAID, and then a separate 8TB external drive that everything on the RAID array is rsynced to for backup (not ideal but it’s something).

Man I was looking for something like this, but at the time I was building my NAS, I couldn’t find something similar so I just decided to build a whole new machine with enough space to contain the drives themselves. Had I known, I might have gone with this and a NUC or something.

I’m actually going the other way and building a proper server out of an ancient HP Proliant ML110 G2 that my dad gave me. Shockingly, it’s fully ATX compatible and has 8+ drive bays. I’m just reusing the case though and stuffing it with more modern components; it was originally equipped with a Pentium 4 😂 I’m not a fan of the single USB connection for all that data.

How’s the performance?

Sufficient I suppose. Limited by the single USB 3 connection. The Mac mini isn’t stressed at all, but the RJ45 connector has some fucky Apple weirdness about it that causes it to go to sleep periodically. There’s a workaround for it that I applied a while ago, but it still drops out occasionally. But, that’s an Apple-specific problem, not the enclosure. The enclosure works fine.

Drive bay I’m using is a Sabrent DS-SC4B, connected via USB3. I’m currently collecting parts for an actual tower build based on a G4560T.

I don’t necessarily disagree with this in theory, as you gotta have some reach in order to spread your message. I forget the name of the particular situation (people don’t use it because it’s not popular, and it’s not popular because people don’t use it…etc etc)

That said, Twitter is a cesspool. Bluesky has enough users that it shouldn’t be an issue reaching out via that instead.

I would just mount the NAS folders via Samba into the NUC. Problem is that services can’t watch the filesystem for changes. If I add a video to my Jellyfin directory, Jellyfin won’t automatically initiate a scan.

That sounds like a config issue. I use NFS shares in a similar way, and Plex/*arr/etc has zero issues watching for changes.

If you want reliability, keep your NAS as a NAS; don’t run applications on the same system. If you screw something up, you’ll have to rebuild the whole thing. Run your applications in a VM at the minimum, that way you can just blow it away and start over if it gets fucked, without touching the NAS.

If I can’t easily retrieve data from perfectly good drives, it is an absolute no go.

I’ve run the same md-raid array in three different machines (ok, I’ve added and swapped a couple drives, but still). I love that about md-raid. Pull the drives out of one system, stick them into another system with mdadm installed, and it recognizes the array immediately.

I went with OMV on older but plenty capable hardware (Intel 4th-7th gen) because 1. I’m cheap, and 2. I could configure it how I wanted.

Glad I went that way, because I was considering “upgrading” to a Synology for a while.

I now have my OMV NAS (currently running on a very-unstressed 2014 Mac mini and a 4-bay drive enclosure), and a separate Proxmox cluster with multiple VMs that use the NAS through NFS shares. Docker-focused VMs are managed by local Dockge instances, which is incredibly handy for visualizing the stacks. Dockge instances can also link to each other, so I can log into any Dockge instance and have everything available.

I can do command line stuff just fine, but I am a visual person, so having all that info right in front of me on one page is very, very helpful.