NAS appliance vs. PC/External Enclosure

[Jagger100]

I have a cheap atom barebones I bought with the intention of making a small server. I realize I would like to allow it to become it bigger than the barebones can support internally and want some hardware failure protection for at least some of what I store.

I'm looking at external raid arrays and other external disk arrays and is there any advantage over those and a standalone NAS box like a synology?

The barebones is an atom D525 with 4Gb RAM. The only external interface is USB 2.0. It can support only 2 Sata drives internally but does have room for a single half/height card.

Since I'll be adding drive per need over time, I can't guarantee they'll be the same model maybe not even the same size. I think this leans me to using the barebones+external enclosure, but I'm not sure?

 

[omniscence]

It basically comes down to your requirements. How many drives do you plan to have in the end? Which bandwidth to you need? I'm not particularly fond of USB drive boxes, as you will need a separate power adapter for each and USB 2.0 is quite slow compared to gigabit ethernet. I would avoid the cabling issue and buy a 4-8 drive NAS. Those are usually more power efficient, too.

However, if your plan is to fiddle around with the system alot a PC works much better there.

 

[wkearney99]

You could use a SAS controller, some support making external connections. You'd use one connection out of the card into an external chassis with multiple drives. Some SAS controllers support using expanders to cascase multiple drives. So just one or two cables can be expanded to dozens of drives. Bear in mind you're going to be throttled by whatever slot is on the board, so while it'll be faster than USB2.0 it still won't be as fast as a board with multiple controllers in PCIe x8 slots.