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Ao7bei3s

Does anyone know of a low power, mini PC that supports 2 or even 4 SATA SSDs (both connector and physical space wise)?

Most, incl. the Lenovo above, seem to support at best 1x M.2 + 1x SATA.

The best choice I have found is using a N100DC-ITX mainboard with a generic ITX case, and those are huge.

I am looking to replace my Raspi / USB SSDs combination.

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I recently migrated my NAS from a Mini-ITX mainboard to a mini PC. Although there are m.2 cards with multiple SATA ports on board, they would require either to keep the PC open or mount it into a bigger case with multiple disks bay. I chose instead a more costly but potentially more stable solution with a IcyBox IB-3780-C31 enclosure (8xSATA to USB3.1) which is well supported by either Linux and FreeBSD, which is important as I use XigmaNAS. The mini PC I used was the only one with a USB3.1 port on board CPU is a N5105 which is more than enough for 4 ZFS mirrors. Feel free to ask if you need more information.

I've lost data by having as my home directory an external drive connected via USB (on an ext4 file system). Then I found a comment on this site saying that Linux's USB driver is known to be unreliable when layering a file system (terminology?) over it.

these types of enclosures are going to be using UAS, USB attached SCSI, which is relatively new. It should deliver a more reliable and manageable experience for external drive enclosures in general (e.g. proper addressing of which drive you want to talk to). If nothing else it's a different code path though.

I've been using a multi-drive UAS enclosure over USB3 as the storage for a VMS for some time, it feels a little weird given USB's history but it has been very reliable and easily saturates the drives from a bandwidth perspective. I'll probably go the same route for bulk storage in the future, since it's a lot easier to get small machines with USB than small machines with 4+ SATA channels.

Which UAS enclosure are you using? Would you recommend it? Any quirks to know about?

I use https://www.startech.com/en-us/hdd/s352bu313r

The internal RAID is neat and I used it for a while, but lately I've had it configured as a JBOD and I let the VMS manage which drive it puts things on. But probably the best thing to do would be to configure it as JBOD (it has DIP switches to choose the mode) and use it with whatever software volume manager you prefer, lvm or btrfs or whatever.

In theory, USB could be avoided with DIY JBOD:

  - Thunderbolt to NVME M.2 enclosure
  - M.2 to SATA breakout

Or:

  - Thunderbolt to NVME M.2 enclosure
  - M.2 to PCIe slot
  - LSI HBA PCIe card to SATA

What I do is I keep using the same (Samsung T7) external drive I lost the data on, but now I use it only to transfer data from one computer's internal drive to another computer's.

The Dell Optiplex 7050 I have can take two SATA SSDs or one SATA HDD and one SATA SSD (my current config). Its processing power is pretty great (esp compared to an RPI), plus it's reasonably sized, sturdy, and it also has a low TDP. I use it as a server for several services (A discord clone, Nextcloud, my blog, video streaming). Got it for $20 at a surplus store, plus $80 for the HDD and $60 for the SSD (I went for very high quality ones) lol.

There are m2 adapters that break out to 4-6 sata ports.

Ex: https://a.aliexpress.com/_Ey8htlr

What is your use case? You can fit a few terabytes in the internal slots; if the additional storage were in the form of USB drives, would that be a problem?

Some of the Lenovo models e.g. m720q have a PCI slot

One option would be to use a riser and a PCI card that supports multiple M2 drives

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