Cheap 2-bay build for experimenting?

the_jest

Explorer
Joined
Apr 16, 2017
Messages
71
I have a working setup, which I don't want to mess with. I also have some older drives sitting in a drawer, and I was interested in playing around with TrueNAS SCALE. Is there any way to get a small 2-bay box going that I could use just to fool around with? I'd just use it as a backup of a backup, so it doesn't have to be particularly fast, or loaded with RAM or extra caching drives, etc.

I'm not even clear what kind of cases there are; there are a bunch of small commodity NAS units (Synology, QNAP, whatever), but what options are there for building your own with this size? I don't really have the space for even a mini-ITX case for what is really just a backup drive.
 

jgreco

Resident Grinch
Joined
May 29, 2011
Messages
18,681
You're basically out of luck. Most of the small commodity NAS units use ARM CPU's with very modest resources and an external PSU in order to get to those sizes.

You may be able to find something small but large enough to handle a pair of 2.5" drives, which is not going to do a whole lot, but can probably be had in the "smaller-than-mini-ITX" size category.
 

warllo

Contributor
Joined
Nov 22, 2012
Messages
117
I have a working setup, which I don't want to mess with. I also have some older drives sitting in a drawer, and I was interested in playing around with TrueNAS SCALE. Is there any way to get a small 2-bay box going that I could use just to fool around with? I'd just use it as a backup of a backup, so it doesn't have to be particularly fast, or loaded with RAM or extra caching drives, etc.

I'm not even clear what kind of cases there are; there are a bunch of small commodity NAS units (Synology, QNAP, whatever), but what options are there for building your own with this size? I don't really have the space for even a mini-ITX case for what is really just a backup drive.

You could try something like this:

https://www.u-nas.com/xcart/cart.php?target=product&product_id=17611
 

the_jest

Explorer
Joined
Apr 16, 2017
Messages
71
Well, that is a very good suggestion; unfortunately, they're out of pretty much everything, with no clear indication of when they'll be back in stock, and they didn't answer an email asking about this.
Will keep looking.
 
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