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Question regarding these mini pcs: how do you connect them to plain old hard drives ? Is thunderbolt / usb these days reliable enough to run 24/7 without disconnects like an onboard sata?

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I've run a massive farm (2 petabytes) of ZFS on FreeBSD servers with Zraid over consumer USB for about fifteen years and haven't had a problem: directly attaching to the motherboard USB ports and using good but boring controllers on the drives like the WD Elements series.

The last sata controller (onboard or otherwise) that I had with known data corruption and connection issues is old enough to drive now

Would you not simply buy a regular NAS?

Why buy a tiny, m.2 only mini-NAS if your need is better met by a vanilla 2-bay NAS?

Good question. I imagine for the silence and low power usage without needing huge amounts of storage. That said, I own an n100 dual 3.5 bay + m.2 mini PC that can function as a NAS or as anything and I think it's pretty neat for the price.

This sounds exactly like what I'm looking. Care to share the brand&model?

AOOSTAR R1

Noise is definitely an issue.

I have an 8 drive NAS running 7200 RPM drives, which is on a wall mounted shelf drilled into the studs.

On the other side of that wall is my home office.

I had to put the NAS on speaker springs [1] to not go crazy from the hum :)

[1] https://www.amazon.com.au/Nobsound-Aluminum-Isolation-Amplif...

power regularly hits 50 cents a kilowatt hour where I live. Most of those seem to treat power like its free.

I have been running usb hdds 24/7 connected to raspberry pi as a nas for 10 years without problems

I've never heard of these disconnects. The OWC ThunderBay works well.

For that money it can make more sense to get a UGreen DXP4800 with built-in N100: https://nas.ugreen.com/products/ugreen-nasync-dxp4800-nas-st...

You can install a third-party OS on it.

I have experienced them - I have a B650 AM5 motherboard and if I connect a Orico USB HDD enclosure to the fastest USB ports, the ones comming directly from the AMD CPU (yes, it's a thing now), after 5-10 min the HDD just disappears from the system. Doesn't happen on the other USB ports.

Well, AMD makes a good core but there are reasons that Intel is preferred by some users in some applications, and one of those reasons is that the peripheral devices on Intel platforms tend to work.

There are nvme to sata adaptors. It’s a little janky with these as you’ll need to leave a cover off to have access to the ports.

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