Im in the market for a NAS solution. By NAS I don’t mean running Jellyfin and some homepage thing for vibes, I mean your old-style “it just provides network attached storage”.
I love the Jonsbo cases but I don’t want to drop as much coin as building out a NAS based on one of them entails. I’m looking for an older office/home/gaming PC or case that has room for atleatst 4 3.5" HDD’s. Something around ten years old with maybe an i5 7th+ gen CPU. I don’t need hardware RAID as I prefer ZFS anyway.
Ideas?
If you go look for a used regular PC case, older model will typically have more 3.5" bays. By older, I mean +15yo.
If you have access to a 3D printer, you have options to make more drive bays on the cheap.
You will have to go for a modern power-supply still, in order to have enough SATA power plugs.
The Fractal Design Define R cases can house a lot of hard drives, but they are kind of big. My Define R6 can theoretically house 11 3.5" drives iirc in addition to 4x 2.5" but it does not come with that many drive sleds out of the box. For the 2.5" drives only 2 sleds are included. I think for the 3.5" it was about 6.
They can also look for older R models, used. I have an R2 Arc Mini that can do 6 drives and it’s not too big.
You can also mount 2.5" drives into the 3.5: trays if you wanted. Ive had my R6 for years now and just bought a 2-pack of drive caddies as it filled up to the point that I now have enough to fill the whole case.
Not exactly cheaper to get than a Jonsbo case.
I like this idea but not keen to go as far as buying a 3D printer.
I might look for something that will hold 4 drives with potential for that kind of expansion later on though.
If you think you might need more, get one with more slots up-front. Trying to add more HDD to a case that wasn’t designed for them sucks.