I am a secret agent who works for 7 different governments. I need your help.

[winnielinnie]

How would you accomplish something like this?

Where do you begin?
Every such "mini" case that has a "carry handle" seems to only have room for one 3.5" HDD. (Has anyone used something similar to this? Do you trust the handle not to break?)



What I hope to accomplish:
To have a "mostly offline" mini NAS that can be carried around by a "handle", which will be mostly kept in secure storage, and can easily be grabbed within seconds in case of emergency. (Or even if there's no emergency, it's just nice to be able to "grab and go".)

This NAS will only be used for occasional backups of my main NAS. No services, no SMB/NFS, no jails, no VMs. Most of its time it will remain in "cold storage". I believe 8 GiB of RAM is plenty for its job; nor does ECC matter as much (which I already use for my main NAS.)

A simple mirror vdev of 16 TiB total capacity, with the OS on a SATA DOM (or m.2) is all that's required.

In other words, I'm looking to create a "glorified USB drive" that can be "easily carried around and secured in storage", but with the ruggedness of a NAS with ZFS.

Unplug power.
Unplug ethernet.
Run out the back door.
Simple. No time wasted.

If you had to put together something to fulfill this role, what would you do?
What parts would you get? What motherboard? What CPU? The price-point should be lower than the requirements for your main NAS.

 

[somethingweird]

a little bigger (personally better handles)

JONSBO T8 PLUS SILVER Mini- ITX Tower Computer Case, Portable Mini ITX case Aluminum/Steel/Tempered Glass- Sides, PSU ATX (Max.140mm), 4 Drive Bay, Built-in 1x140mm Fan Top, Silver PC Case - Newegg.com

Buy JONSBO T8 PLUS SILVER Mini- ITX Tower Computer Case, Portable Mini ITX case Aluminum/Steel/Tempered Glass- Sides, PSU ATX (Max.140mm), 4 Drive Bay, Built-in 1x140mm Fan Top, Silver PC Case with fast shipping and top-rated customer service. Once you know, you Newegg!

www.newegg.com

then add - Atom Processor C3xxx

winnie - SSD or HD? coze this is only 2.5 bays

 

[winnielinnie]

SSD or HD? coze this is only 2.5 bays

Going for HDD (3.5") for the better price-per-TB. I can shuck a WD external and get a pair of nice HDDs for a fraction of the cost of the equivalent in SSDs.

 

[winnielinnie]

This looks promising, and it opens up more options to different cases, without the hard requirement for a "handle".

https://www.amazon.com/Trunab-Carrying-Desktop-Computer-Transporting/dp/B08QS8NWL3/

Something about the plastic clips makes me feel uneasy. If you consider a small form factor ATX case + internal components, you're looking at a decent amount of weight.

Would still need an affordable small case that can house at least two 3.5-inch HDDs, with a "good enough" motherboard, CPU, and PSU.

 

[Stux]

Have you considered a jbod with an external sas cable?

More like a glorified usb drive then.

 

[winnielinnie]

with an external sas cable?

What would this plug into? I have no means to plug it into my current home NAS chassis.

 

[Stux]

An LSI HBA card with an external port. Or a PCI backplane cover with an external port that runs to an internal port

 

[Apollo]

Technically you would need 8 of them.
One you keep for yourself, and the 7 others you destroy so that the agents of the 7 government can't get their hands on it.

Jokes apart, you would still be better off with ECC. If you go with non server grade HW, then loss of BIOS settings due to depleted CMOS backup battery could introduce instability of the RAM if set to some default.

Weight can be a problem, not in itself, but the various components within the enclosure could suffer damage or shift if forces exerted on the enclosure is significant, such as heatsink... Torsion or warping of the enclosure could translate to forces on PCIe cards if any, and cause connector damage....

You still need to factor in scrub time, especially when taken out of storage weeks or month apart.
Have you considered having removable hard drives and multiple replication pools?
What I have done is repurpose my earlier Supermicro MB which used to run my FreeNAS instance. It now serves as my backup server and periodically I swap out my pools and perform replication. I keep the MB in a closet on a cabinet and all I do is swap the disk (with proper shutdown and power up). If you can manage having multiple pools, then you can have them located in different part of the world, basement, offsite storage, bank safety box...

You can then get a protection case for the HDD if needed.

 

[Stux]

I remember swapping these.

(They had a cover)

Ironically, would be a good solution.

 

[Etorix]

If you had to put together something to fulfill this role, what would you do?

First, not brag on the Internet about the reason for my very special requirements. The eight government might notice…

The killer point is the handle. With it, you're limited to LAN-party cases, which probably do without HDDs by now.
How good are your soldering skills? Or your sewing skills for a carrying harness?

Without the handle, a Jonsbo N1 looks like it would fit in a bag.
Cheaper than a A2SDi or X10SDV motherboard: Grab a MJ11-EC1 during your next mission to Europe.
Or just any consumer mini-ITX motherbaord which is old enough to have six SATA ports if you do not need ECC.

 

[Stux]

If the secret agent only wants two disks this may work well.

https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B0861QC8CC/

They also make 5 bay ones.

Yes. USB. But if the drives are passed through unmollested then it’s fine for backups.

 

[winnielinnie]

Interesting concept, but that would require doing pool import-exports every time, and if there was an unexpected emergency (or just out of convenience), the external JBOB enclosure could not be "powered on" to a fully fledge NAS server. (I would have to build another server with an LSI HBA card + external port just to access the data on the pool.)

The appeal of a "portable carry-and-go" NAS server is that it can seamlessly become the new "main" NAS server.

 

[winnielinnie]

you would still be better off with ECC. If you go with non server grade HW, then loss of BIOS settings due to depleted CMOS backup battery could introduce instability of the RAM if set to some default.

I want to keep the costs minimum, which means not only saving money by choosing non-ECC RAM, but it also means I can get by with a CPU and motherboard that don't need to also support ECC RAM.

(And since my main NAS already uses ECC RAM, where ZFS checks every block during a replication, I'd assume that the data on the "mini / portable" backup is also corruption-free.)

Have you considered having removable hard drives and multiple replication pools?

I hinted at why I'd rather not, in my previous post:

The appeal of a "portable carry-and-go" NAS server is that it can seamlessly become the new "main" NAS server.

 

[winnielinnie]

Without the handle, a Jonsbo N1 looks like it would fit in a bag.

That's actually hitting close to what I'm looking for. Using the "straps" from a few posts above, it might in fact work perfectly.

Adding it to my shopping list.

 

[Koop]

First, not brag on the Internet about the reason for my very special requirements. The eight government might notice…

The killer point is the handle. With it, you're limited to LAN-party cases, which probably do without HDDs by now.
How good are your soldering skills? Or your sewing skills for a carrying harness?

Without the handle, a Jonsbo N1 looks like it would fit in a bag.
Cheaper than a A2SDi or X10SDV motherboard: Grab a MJ11-EC1 during your next mission to Europe.
Or just any consumer mini-ITX motherbaord which is old enough to have six SATA ports if you do not need ECC.

Oh nice. I was familiar with the N5 but the N1 looks even more like a piece of small luggage.

 

[winnielinnie]

The included backplane makes me nervous. I wonder if you can easily bypass it and just directly connect PSU power and SATA cables from the drives to the motherboard? (Especially if you only end up installing 2 HDDs.) It's hard to tell from the photos.

 

[joeschmuck]

So you want portable. I can recall when a 25" color TV (the glass kind) would have a pair of handles on the side of the case and it was called "portable". Yea, not really but that was the sell. The Sony Trinitron with the very thick front glass, one heavy SOB.

I assume you want something lighter.

This little ditty might handle your needs if all you need is a backup, nothing fancy beyond that.

This has all the connections you would need and just plop in a few SSDs, or Archiving SMR drives
It comes with 8GB RAM, not sure you could add anything more. The OS fits on a TF card (up to 64GB).
Overall nice and compact, like a good 'ole microdot us old spies used back in the day. You had to have a good eye.

 

[MrGuvernment]

Why not use ECC ram, since this will be cold storage and for backups I presume, why not be absolutely sure the data copied is good...between ECC and ZFS....

 

[Etorix]

Oh nice. I was familiar with the N5 but the N1 looks even more like a piece of small luggage.

Er, you must mean N2 (N1 in cube shape) or N3 (8 disks). Or N4, since I just found there is now a micro-ATX case in the family (would be nice with a Gigabyte MC12-EC0) but I couldn't find a N5.

The included backplane makes me nervous. I wonder if you can easily bypass it and just directly connect PSU power and SATA cables from the drives to the motherboard? (Especially if you only end up installing 2 HDDs.) It's hard to tell from the photos.

I suspect no because it is part of the drive locking mechanism. But what's the issue with the backplane? Even without hot-swap it means less clutter with power cables.
With the N1 the backplane does not even interfere with cooling, since air flows along the width of the drives rather than the length.

 

[somethingweird]

Does have to run truenas? Can it be any OS with zfs? Heh - more options!?