I have a DS220+, which frankly I love, but I’m looking to replace it soon. It only has 2 drives, Synology is pulling some fuckery with needing their branded drives and I’m staying on the 6.x firmware given what I’ve seen/heard with 7.x

All that being said, I’m trying to find something that is:

  • At least 4 bays
  • Small form factor (it shouldn’t be much bigger than the drives it’s holding)
  • Capable of running Docker
  • Capable of backing up to an S3 bucket
  • Capable of backing up Windows Clients
  • Habe a decent GUI (I can do CLI, but frankly, don’t want to)

I was thinking potentially QNAP, but didn’t know what else is out there. I really do like Synology and would have looked at one of their models but their vendor lock in move ticked me off. Maybe finding a used 420 or 920?

  • Daniel Quinn@lemmy.caEnglish
    1·
    4 days ago

    What exactly is an external drive case? Are you just talking about a USB enclosure for a single drive or something that can somehow hold multiple drives and interface over something more stable than USB?

    • webghost0101@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      2·
      4 days ago

      The technical term seems to be a JBOD bay. (Just a Bunch Of Disks)

      Basic ones are probably usb, ideally you have something that has a SFF port. Modern ones might also have thunderbolt.

      Finding a micropc that supports SFF out of the box might be a challenge but some do support pci express cards.

      Apparently there also exists something like Oculink which is pci over cable but i know even less about that one.

      EDIT: if you look for “Nas enclosure 4bay” you actually do find plenty of options (Jonsbro N3 per example) that allow you to build it all in one unit with a mini-itx board. A nas pretty much just is a pc with special software so this would be what i recommend.