Find the best deals for mini PCs on eBay and Amazon. With many of them entering the used market, this tool helps you find a cheap mini PC based on your needs. Prices are updated a few times per hour.

Thought this might be helpful as a lot of these mini PCs are hitting the used market.

  • @piratEnglish
    2•2 months ago

    I’m in the same situation as you, more or less… I have three new 22TB drives that need an enclosure, preferably for JBOD (no hardware RAID needed) but I can’t figure out which ones are actually good products… I don’t mind using a random-brand product if it’s actually solid.

    I find it very difficult to figure out which ones will support my 22TB drives. And for some of them, it seems, it’s impossible to add new drives to empty slots later (because of hardware RAID, I guess?), which has made me hesitant in buying one with more slots than I have drives, in case they can’t be utilized later on anyway…

    I was looking at the QNAP TR-004 which was mentioned by someone else somewhere on Lemmy some months ago, but IIRC it would be impossible to use the fourth slot later if the drive isn’t included in the hardware RAID configuration…

    EDIT: I have also been looking into so-called “backplanes” as an alternative, since they seem to do the job and are cheaper, but I’m unsure if I’ll need a PC chassis/case/tower for that to actually work?

    If you find something good (products or relevant info), feel free to share it with me.

    • @[email protected]English
      2•2 months ago

      I’ve run a TR-004 for the last 5 years haven’t had any reliability issues so far. In hardware raid modes, drives are hot swappable but you can’t grow the array without wiping it. I’m JBOD mode you need to power off before swapping drives. The main problem I’ve had is their chipset is only partially supported by smartmontools due to proprietary crap so there is some strange behaviour there.

      • @piratEnglish
        2•2 months ago

        Thanks for your response. Much appreciated. Do I understand it correctly that I’ll be able to add more drives later in JBOD mode, but I’ll simply have to power it off before adding or swapping drives?

    • @[email protected]English
      2•2 months ago

      Yeah, I don’t understand why JBOD with a decent chipset is so hard to find. I really don’t expect much from it, I just want to slide some drives in and have everything run consistently for a few months at a time. I’ll power cycle periodically to apply updates, so I’m not looking for 24/7/365 operation or anything.

      FWIW, Level1Techs seems to recommend MediaSonic (timestamp is where he talks about reliability), but doesn’t give it a ringing endorsement. And that was one of the better ones he’s seen…

      After a bunch of research, what I’ve found is:

      • okay chipset, but garbage build quality (no dampening for drives, no hot-swap, etc)
      • fancy controller that doesn’t support JBOD - non-starter for me, I don’t want anything to do with hw controllers
      • expensive - at a certain point, I’ll just keep my oversized ATX case that does the job

      Now I’m looking for compact cases that support 5 drives, like this one (a little too cheap perhaps?) or this one. It just seems reliable 4-5 bay USB-C enclosures just aren’t that popular.