I’ve been doing JBOD for over a decade. I have backups of all devices but I prefer this over a RAID. Figured I should bring this up before the discussion starts.
I’ve always done this within a tower with a CPU etc and never a dedicated NAS. Just always seemed to work better that way. At this point my server is over 100 TB. I want to finally move this external and with drives being 20TB+ this doesn’t seem like a huge deal.
What is the best enclosure within reason to make this happen? I see QNAP and other brands out there but I’d like to hopefully hear from someone that actually uses them. Any tips or recommendations?
If you have some old hardware sitting around and are just building a simple NAS with the Plex server on another box getting its files from the NAS, then I would recommend TrueNAS. ZFS is rock solid as is the BSD operating system. You handle all setups thru a web gui. It has a guide and forum community with lots of online help.
I’ll definitely check that out. I was more looking for advice on enclosures. I’d like to move the drives out of the PC and into a box. I still want to use this machine for the same duties its been doing for Plex except physically holding the storage being accessed.
I’ve been looking into this recently because I have no empty bays on my 4-bay NAS case (not a pre-made NAS like a Synology, home made), and my storage pools are getting close to safe “full” levels (80% filled).
One thing I have noticed with many JBOD devices is there are limits on drive size they can supposedly use, and 8 TB is the common max size. So make sure you get a device that supports high-capacity disks if you go with a JBOD. It looks like SAS devices (not plain SATA JBOD) seem to support larger drives more.
