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Comment by exmadscientist | Hacker News Reader

Are there any NAS solutions for 3.5" drives, homebrew or purchased, that are slim enough to stash away in a wall enclosure? (This sort of thing: https://www.legrand.us/audio-visual/racks-and-enclosures/in-... , though not that particular model or height.) I'd like to really stash something away and forget about it. Height is the major constraint, you can only be ~3.5" tall. And before anyone says anything about 19" rack stuff, don't bother. It's close but just doesn't go, especially if it's not the only thing in the enclosure.

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I have the Terramaster F8 SSD Plus with 8x4TB NVME SSDs as the drives. It's definitely not the most cost effective way to build a NAS vs spinning disks, but I wanted small and quiet, which this is. It would probably fit in a wall enclosure, so depending on budget/how badly you wanted it to fit/drive space required this would probably work as a solution.

I'm about to fill up 8TB and on a rather limited budget so that seems like a no go :(

I am starting to seriously consider taking a thin 2.5" or M.2 form factor machine and running SATA cables out to an external drive cage though....

> And before anyone says anything about 19" rack stuff, don't bother. It's close but just doesn't go, especially if it's not the only thing in the enclosure.

Do you have to use that particular wall enclosure thing? A 1U chassis at 1.7” of height fits 4 drives (and a 2U at ~3.45” fits 12), and something like a QNAP is low-enough power to not need to worry about cooling too much. If you’re willing to DIY it would not be hard at all to rig up a mounting mechanism to a stud, and then it’s just a matter of designing some kind of nice-looking cover panel (wood? glass in a laser-cut metal door? lots of possibilities).

I guess my main question is, what/who is this for? I can’t picture any environment that you have literally 0 available space to put a NAS other than inside a wall. A 2-bay synology/qnap/etc is small enough to sit underneath a router/AP combo for instance.

> Do you have to use that particular wall enclosure thing?

It's already there in the wall. All the Cat5e cabling in the house terminates there, so all the network equipment lives in there, which makes me kind of want to also put the NAS in there.

1 liter PC's (tiny/mini/micro), or some N100 type build + external bay is likely your best bet. If it's really that small, you might have heat issues.

Check if your enclosure has an extension bracket, like this one: https://www.legrand.us/audio-visual/structured-wiring-enclos...

It adds enough depth to fit plenty of regular-sized components.

I concluded that was not possible with this particular model last time I looked, though I should try again (sadly I didn't take notes). It may well have been that the required part was simply out of stock everywhere.

Or it might have been that the lovely, lovely human beings who installed this thing somehow screwed it up so that no extender would ever fit. They had a habit of doing that. Unfortunately, the best way to summarize the electrical in this new-construction house is that Mistakes Were Made™.

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