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Looking for advice for media server storage expansion

I currently have a pretty simple media server. It runs on a desktop made of old parts and has 4 6 TB drives in a raidz1 array. It is used by a lot of friends who add a lot of media, so its been nearly at capacity for a while. The desktop has no more open SATA ports or drive enclosures, so I'm not sure what the best option for adding more drives is.

I know the most obvious answer is buying NAS, but I think it might be a little complex for what I need, because no other devices need any access to this storage. I was considering purchasing a DAS, as it seems like a simple option, but I've seen many people say its not worth purchasing a DAS over a NAS. Any opinions would be appreciated.

Edit: Thanks for the suggestions! I'm likely going to go with a new case for some extra drive bays and a PCI-E SAS controller, this seems like the best option for the simplicity and price!

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  • I use a USB-attached drive array for some bulk, low-throughput storage. I've been happy with this, except for one thing that I didn't think about prior to getting mine: a considerable number of these, including mine, do not have the option to power on after power loss. This is extremely obnoxious if you use or have any intention of using the computer remotely and would like it to come back up after power loss. For me, it was the only component that couldn't be brought back up automatically.

    I'm in the process of switching to one that does right now, but I'd mention it to you to as something to keep in mind.

    I considered a NAS as well myself, but didn't want it for a couple of reasons:

    • I am generally not happy about having a lot of hardware that can potentially phone home on a network. The drive array is isolated, and I control the PC (well, short of the BIOS/firmware/etc).

    • I had an existing machine that could perfectly reasonably serve the stuff that had adequate uptime. If you're going to be serving content to friends, you may not want to be using, say, a desktop that you use for other things, since if you need to reboot it, you're going to interrupt their use.

    • Trying to understand whether NASes have implemented things securely worries me. There are a number of cases where I've been unpleasantly surprised before with network transport of data (e.g. when I looked at it at one point, SMB having secure authentication but then shipping the actual data over the network in plaintext).

    • Also not sure how long the NAS gets security updates.

    • Also sometimes companies have been purchased by other companies or tried to get creative in figuring out ways to make more money from existing customers, like having routers insert ads in webpages. If the product can't touch the network, the issue doesn't come up.

    One reason that I would consider getting a NAS over DAS is if you want the server to be physically distant from the storage array. USB isn't really made to run long distances -- you need repeaters, and there are distance limitations, though you can get, and I have, optical transceivers for longer runs. Ethernet is designed for this and works fine with it.

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