This is technically a NAS... 

I love how far your channel has come. Your editing is growing in to a great style of its own. Keep it up dude!

You manage to make the most interesting videos out even a DAS! Well done many thank yous 🙏🏻 👍🏻😊

I like your shirt. And the duck tape. Nice touch!

Something like this really makes sense for a remote backup at a friend’s house. Low power, relatively cheap, and easy to stash. You have an off-site backup, and your friend’s wife doesn’t complain about an outrageously high power bill every month.

Terramaster is definitely the budget friendly home lab/backup go to, in my opinion. Even though USB is "not recommended" running ZFS, I have not encountered any issues using usb storage as the boot drive (mirrored) in my F2-423 setup, for almost over a year and a half. I have 2 of them, in my setup. One is a SSD NAS running TrueNAS Scale, NextCloud, Syncthing, Tailscale. That is used to sync my iPhone contacts & photos (iCloud ain't getting my money and data LOL), Laptops and various devices data & configs, legally obtained Plex media (Plex runs on another device and not any of the NASes), and the other NAS (HDDs) is running TrueNAS scale, Syncthing to backup the SSD NAS (Only Photos, Contacts, device data & configs. I don't waste space backing up the Plex media, if that is gone too bad). I also backup all my important data and configs to Blu-ray monthly and store the disk offsite. I had no clue Terramaster even sold a 6 bay DAS, I knew of their 6 bay NAS (that looks the same). Keep up the good work proving "da haters" wrong, that just because something is not recommended doesn't mean it doesn't work at all, and doesn't have a use case. I will let you know when I encounter problems with my USB mounted boot drives. Anyway keep on trucking my fellow Jenker.

Wow! Great video! Such a good idea! I always knew you were the best RU-vidr ever!!!

RU-vid algorithm. This man is not only a genius, but he’s so good at handling small things.

Jank is dank, I like the content. Keep up the good work 🤙

Thanks Mate. Loved It!

Didn’t know about the OMV USB raid trick thx for educating me

The real treasure was the hard drives we bought along the way

so Instructive and I had a few laughs. Thanks 😀

The article that you show (The MAC 911) is about adding multiple single usb enclosed drives to a raid setup. The issues addressed by this has nothing to do with your setup, since you are using a single DAS enclosure for all drives. This setup works perfectly. I have been running this for years without issues in a ZFS RAID-Z.

Thank i so enjoy your videos. I like that you are honest. Huge double thumks up for making easy to follow videos. Have damn fine day!🎉

A very entertaining video ... now I will look for that 6+ month follow-up referenced.

This is a great idea cuz using USB give u more flexibility on what computer you can use for your server, opening options to a wide range of Mini PC with ultra low idle power (whereas these PC do not have many sata port/power for regular HDD connection). I'd also suggest SnapRaid + Mergerfs to take it to another level, giving even more flexibility. I've been using external HDD running on a random PC with samba as a file storage for a while so I approve your setup.

I actually have a similar setup to this, but without RAID, and OMV is in a virtual machine under Proxmox (hard drives passthrough) in my Chinese mini PC. It's been running solid since I built it 3 or 4 months ago. I have a Yottamaster DAS instead, which is almost 3 times cheaper (but 5 drives instead of 6). I think it's 3.2 USB as well, but I could be wrong. I use this setup to backup my main NAS and do other things under Proxmox.

Im looking forward to the 6-month followup!

This was helpful. I do video and photography. I store my backup drives (all my spare drives) in 2 towers like this terra master... sitting on my desk because they are usb. I put both tower into a closet with a raspberry pi and then watched a bunch of youtube vids on how to with pi and linux. I gave up on PI and now have ordered a used micro computer i got on ebay. Your videos have been the most helpful as to what the hell a VM, container and docker are/setting them up.

Great video! I was thinking for something similar to this as I'm very limited to space available. But the cost of the DAS isn't worth it imo

That’s an awesome idea!

Best video ever on the RU-vid ALgorithm!

Brett - I seriously was thinking of picking up an enclosure for my HDDs to move my NAS to a spare mini PC. Instead I decided it was better to just convert my desktop into a full-time server. Not a crazy idea to do what you did by any means.

Will it work with using mergerfs/unionfs instead of standard Raid ? I currently use it on my Helios4 NAS for its low HDD power usage advantages.

I have been running a similar setup for about a year now. It is a Lenovo Tiny paired with a TerraMaster 5 bay DAS. I used UnRaid and haven't had any issues. People warn against it but I've never had an issue. Speeds are fine if you have a ssd cache setup.

Loved the video. Could you try and make a zfs pool out of usb hard disks? I'd love to watch it lol

I'm doing this with OMV on a Dell 5070 Extended with an external 5 bay eSATA enclosure, and it's been running with no issues for the last 3 months.

This is the best idea ever. Great video! On a second note, how is the powerconsumption of the das alone? Im still looking for a really low power diy nas solution.

Great video

I have the terramaster d4-300 and a t8 plus mini pc, they look great together with the silver finish, super happy with having a media server also! : D

Great video. I did enjoy this. Thanks for covering all of this. Love all of the content you make, @RO. One of my favorite channels. You remind me of @ByteMyBits when he first started.

can you pass thru a das into a truenas vm to create a zfs pool?? just curious

I did this same thing with an extra Mac mini and an OWC enclosure. I connected a 10gb Ethernet adapter and I can edit video on it over the network, so I’m pretty psyched I didn’t have to go buy and learn a synology. Plus I can use the Mac mini as a local editing bay. Where I’m getting stuck is getting consistent access to it outside of my network. I’ve been using Tailscale and screens… but there’s still some hiccups. Would love to see you do a Mac mini video editing server

i love the video. if i can Ask a question of a tangent here. i know DAS might be boring but for my use case i like it. so what do you think of teramaster Vs OWC DAS which is better i need to know because i need to piick one then get 2 8-bay units one as my daily unite use for media and the other as the back unite . so ur opinion which is better terramaster or OWC taking into consideration the unite itself and the raid pc app ????

Thanks!

Great stuff, not sure if it's the hardware combination that I would choose, but hey it works let's see if it still does in 6 months

I like the idea of running those tiny PC for NAS. I'd probably run JBOD instead of RAID if using USB DAS, since it might be safer as a usb drive, but then it loses redundancy of raid.

What's the model of that DAS? I can't find it anywhere. Only the NAS version.

Oh wow, I was literally thinking about making a similar setup for my dad, and then this video pops up. Coincidence, or does Brett work for Big Data 🤔 Brett, what do you think about making a sort of all-in-one tech quickie style video that covers networking from top to bottom for beginners? Things like explaining what DHCP is, what a DNS is, what common terms you see in the community are like pfsense, etc. I made my first NAS following your videos almost exclusively, so I know you've already covered a lot of this in your other videos, but I think it would be nice to have it all sort of neatly compiled into a single video that a beginner with no knowledge could always reference back to as a one stop shop when they run into issues. Speaking personally as a beginner, I found your style of explanation to be funny and easy to digest, and I think the visuals you use to help explain are really helpful.

This is the best idea ever :)

Have a DAS and a Raspberry Pi running CasaOS and it is *LEGEND*

Thanks for this enlightening video!! 😂

The Terramaster DAS is a pretty cool idea. But holy hell $300 for an disk holder? if it were 100-150 sure that is a hell of a deal, but you can buy a used case, several USB to sata adapters, and a USB hub, plug in and go for 1/4 the price. And yes build it yourself is most always going to beat buying a prebuilt, But this seems very Niche for what it is. If they cut the price in 1/2 I'm sure they'd have a hard time keeping these on the shelves for Homelabbers.

Can the ORICO 2 Bay or 4 bay drive enclosure work with mini pc on true nas core

I use OMV and do prefer the new Compose plugin myself, just a couple of things to point out, there IS a stop button, in fact there is more features than Portainer has. Of course there is noting wrong with running Portainer as its only a docker container. A few advantages are that it's easier to backup your docker-compose (stacks) files, it has a global env file that has all my variables in and makes setting up compose files nice and easy. But each to their own. I do prefer OMV use of docker rather than Truenas scale, which I thought would be better. But I see more trouble with scale and I prefer to have my own compose files rather charts. I do really like OMV as I use JBOD. Looking forward to more OMV videos

As much as I remember, you got to create a file system first ( I quick wipe every drive before using with any NAS software) and then you can create raid or mergerfs with SnapRaid.

Been running a seven usb drive raid 6 nas for the last 6 years. It's on it's third host, using webmin to manage. No idea why it's supposed to be bad. 2 backups though.

finally a funny, NOT cringy tech RU-vidr

Wow! Great video! Such a good idea! I always knew you were the best RU-vidr ever!!! Def would like to see a 6 month follow up.

I just literally did just that coupling a mini pc with Windows server 2022 and this DAS with 6*4TB HDD. I have a R/W of about 400MB/s on average and it's been working fine using storage space.

well done. it's a good idea for home lab. while doubling the cost with buying an actual NAS and use it with other devices to create a NAS. but the fun curve are better than acually using the NAS build in OS. Boooring... lol I like building truenas scale on a storage that already has RAID in it. why? because its fun and configurable as you want. wondering if multiple USB drives (just regular ol' usb HDD) can use the same technique to setup as RAID. hmm. thanks for the vid Brett.. greatly informative.

would this work better with unraid?

Im actually in the process of doing this same thing. I got a 1L lenovo and have been looking for a way to attach hdds to it.

I have this same mini pc with a different DAS running unraid + plex for around 4 months with no issues. Quite a bit cheaper than most NAS and I can always add another DAS to expand the capacity.

Can you connect a DAS to a router's USB and combine them into a single volume?

Would it fit inside a 10" rack?

Came here for the NAS. Stayed for the laughs

first time viewer. nice style of presentation I'm subscribing

I really appreciate this. I wish that DAS cases were NAS cases. It would make the lives of those who want a simple small footprint DIY NAS possible.

Raid Owl named his PC "Dat S" and every day is exited when he gets the alert "Time to back dat S up"

This is the best series of bad ideas. Love it. By the way, I run a raid has on usb. No probs, but it’s not something I would professionally recommend.

I run two "used" 1 TB drives in an ORICO 4-bay HDD enclosure, in RAID0 as my "workspace/network share" drive. I run Handbrake encodes and anything else that would unnecessarily use up writes on my SSDs. They're on borrowed time, but they seem to work fine enough for what I'm using it for. All data on it can be lost and I would have a copy of it elsewhere. I'm also sharing that drive with a computer with a J4125 processor, so even worse than the 5105, and it again, works good enough for what I'm using it for. Terabytes worth of data has been written over the network onto that drive, and has run constantly for years without failure. This setup runs faster than the ethernet port can support, so I found little reason to spec beyond that, since the ethernet port on it is not upgradeable.

I've done the same thing with a Mediasonic Probox 4 and a Mele Q3 (5105/8Gb) but rather than use OpenMediaVault, I just installed a minimal Debian 12 and setup Samba. I even went so far as to use ZFS RaidZ2 with 4 x 20Tb drives. It's not the fastest DIY NAS but it works perfectly and takes ~52-56 hours for a ZFS scrub to complete.

that omv docker change broke my setup a couple months ago and ended up pushing me to use unraid instead. I was actually using a yottamaster usb drive enclosure at the time, and never had any issues with my usb connection dropping out on me.

by the looks of that enclosure you might be able to mod it to enclose a raspberry pi and make it more of a nas, would be interesting to see even more so if you got a 10gb usb 3 adapter to work on the pi. nice LTT mousepad, I got the same one on my desk.

I have a terramaster 2bay has running TrueNAS. I also have one of their DAS that I may end up connecting to it.

THat little micro pc in your big hands is BEGGING you to install OpNsense or Pfsense and setup a router !! DO IT !!!!

I am actually using a rpi4 with two 18TB MyBooks in a zfs mirror as my NAS and Plex Server. For testing I attached an old sharkoon DAS enclosure and had up to 9 drives in a raidz :D Seeing a rasberry pi using almost 100 watt was very impressive ^^

I'm using two DAS's with my DS218+, and they don't count as volumes, but... performance-wise, they're working just fine.

5:40 1 Gigabyte LAN is slower than USB 3.0 / Sata SSD ?

Dropped a like for the "dated bootstrap" theme joke :'D

When I think of a NAS I envisage my Raspberry Pi, its powered hub and 6 multi Terabyte USB disks. It supports SAMBR, FTP, any additional Linux functionality that I needed to add (DDNS, Rsynch, sheduled backups, auto time synch, nmon, etc etc), Internet remote access and it runs headless or connected via VNC. In total it cost me less than $100 excluding disks. (Admittedly it is rather slow, but I can stream 2 videos simultaneously so that's good enough for me.) It has worked almost flawlessly for 4 years so far and now has 20TB of disk space.

This was entertaining as I am currently rescuing data from a Terramaster NAS. My wife picked one up for a super-low price Thinking I would like it. The NAS corrupted it's OS. It will soon be Unraid

have you done an update after leaving it running?

The important question is: did they skimp on the PSU as usual? That's the main reason why after a few months the drives suddenly lose data.

Would prefer is thunderbolt to a 4 bay enclosure like from OWC. That way you get far more reliability than just USB.

I've been running 3 4tb external drive in raid 5 with a powered usb 3 hub for almost a year and never had any issue, maybe I'll upgrade to something like this soon this seems less stupid. Edit: I forgot to mention that I used a usb nic

I use OMV at home; only thing i dont like: no upgrade between versions. I bought a 5-bay HDD DAS (from another mfg), so far so good. I dont need it for tons of data writing, just simple backups

the biggest thing that bugs me about these actually very powerful little boxes with 10-15w cpus (honestly, love me some low power kit I can toss in the corner running whatever workloads I'd like to throw at them), is the lack of 10g networking. SOME of them have 2.5g networking, but I don't WANT 2.5g networking... on anything... it's dumb, 10g came first, just give me 10g already! dual 10g networking on an inexpensive little device under $150 with 4-6 cores would make a FANTASTIC proxmox box and a cheap way to build a cluster if you got a few of them... or it could also be a fantastic firewall/router box, again if it had dual 10g. (either sfp or 10g-base-t would be fine).

To be fair, I'm rocking a Lenovo M73 Tiny running Proxmox: inside of it I have my various LXCs as well as a VM running TrueNAS which is using a USB 3.0 external HDD :D It's been running for almost a full year now, I had no idea I could have called it a DAS :P

I think unraid will work very well like this without the need to fiddle around with anything. And I dont see any downsides for this setup. Its a way to run a low powered nas.

Love it... I love this project.. I didn't know about these tiny PCs. Sheesh... now what AM I going to do with my room full of towering, electricity-devouring x86 boxes anymore? They're going the way of the horse...not so useful anymore and expensive to maintain... Dammit.

Haha I’m leaving a comment BEFORE I watch the video. I did something similar but completely different. A 2017 MacBook Pro with Thunderbolt 3 and an OWC 4m2 which houses 4 4tb nvme’s. The Mac OS has built in raid 0/1 and tested speeds are 1800/2400 write read speeds. A 10g ethernet would be nice but I only have 1g currently. Not bad for a pc guy stumbling around Mac OS. The macbook was 379 refurbished at micro center, and the m2 Mac mini currently running this setup was 499 at Costco.

it's best idea ever if you don't mind paying more for a Hard Disk Enclosure than the pc it self lol

439 for a diy box without drives is just dumb. You can buy a refurbished enterprise setup for that price capable of much more than only being a NAS with a DAS. Fun video, though. You're a funny guy

I am using 3 hhd with mergerfs on laptop

It's very frustrating that eSATA used to make it possible to create a NAS where the PC and the disks were in different boxes connected by a cable. But we can't anymore after eSATA died because USB became better and faster. It's a step backwards.

i did this with Pi4 about 3 years ago using a usb hdd dock and its still running fine to this day. Although i installed OMV onto raspbian and used that for the software usb raid.

My man using NAS... #RESPECT "God's son" across the belly, I prove you lost already The king is back, where my crown at? 🎶🎵🎼

SATA "AF" Can't get more SATA then that. ( 2:48 ) Sorry, my simple mind giggled.

@RaidOwl Are you still running this? revisit and give your opinion 6 months later?

I want to do something similar. But was thinking of having a mini-pc router with usb 3.1 c connection. Then I could just attach a das and also run virtual machines from it. Still looking at one that has enough horsepower. Say.. 8core and 32gig ram. Thanks for video! Instant sub'd.

Wow! Great video! Such a good idea! I always knew you were the best RU-vidr ever!!! i like your financial videos, they help me on financial planning, stocks market, gold savings account, high-income invesment and stock exchanges!

for that price , the mini pc and the das , you can get a normal pc and have a much better nas , can iven ad a 10gb nic most mb suport 6 drives , and most old type case suport 6 drives

Cool video, I'd love to see what kind of uptime it gets! Also, I'm a simple smooth ape so please be patient with me... Why doesn't anyone make a device like this with mini sas connectors? I'd love a tower case with just a PSU and mini-sas connectors to live outside whatever form factor machine I want to use for my NAS. NAS cases are horrible. It's like they took the designer who flunked out of case design school and had them make a case that can't actually fit basic ATX standard hardware (like access to pcie when fullly populated with drives) and then sell it for like $250 or $400. Maybe Terramaster is the company to figure this out? Stop wth the low effort software and start making modular mini-SAS enclosures and/or some actually affordable and well designed NAS cases. How is this not a thing?

I am glad docker is broken, steve from gn may have other opinions surrounding this entire setup. we could be looking at the rise of the new king for media and entertainment in the tech sector with this video

Damn it bro... 😂😂😂 04:01

$30-40 thin client plus usb3 to DAS. Thats has got to be cheaper than a NAS.

Hence proved. Nas is always the way to go. Das is not user friendly to new users. Nas>das

Does it still run?