Most people here are the exact opposite of you and don't trust hardware RAID especially cheap implementations in a USB based DAS box. Software RAID is far more flexible and makes your setup independent of the hardware RAID cad dying.
Yeah I definitely get that. All the DAS I see with hardware raid look like shit. I mostly don't trust software raid being run on a separate machine. I have read stories of losing all the data even after shutdown properly and attaching the DAS after moving or something.
I am using a mac mini, it would be much easier if I was just using a full desktop computer, very easy build.
I have been searching and learning a bunch but there doesn't really seem to be any good methods that I can find.
You would think more companies would be putting out DAS considering the capabilities of USB3.2 and Thunderbolt. I have been looking for a quality DAS but almost all of them don't have built in hardware RAID. I don't really trust software RAID. Mostly rebuilding if the software crashes or my hardware crashes. Even if I was ok going with soft RAID, almost every model has a huge flaw.
It feels like getting a NAS is the only real way to go and basically just using it as an ethernet DAS for my server. It just seems like a waste of a processor. Should I just build a DAS with 4 Bay Rack? Then I have to find a place to mount a PSU and tidy up one of those PCIe to 4 Sata boards and PCIe to USB board as well as a couple fans.
Is there a good cheap enclosure to just install 4 HDD, a couple boards and a PSU? Am I missing some other easy option? It just feels like the market now is to buy a NAS and use it as a DAS.
Walmart maybe? It's a shame best buy is going to stop.
As a side note, I have a question for you or anyone else in datahorder that uses the BluRay ripping method.
Do you consider the BluRay disc as a method of redundancy?
It seems like a reasonable idea to store all your rips in 1 or 2 hard drive that aren't raided. It saves so much space and the only real downfall is if it fails you have to rip the disc's again. I'm just curious of other pitfalls doing it this way. The only one I can really think of is that you might lose your media server indexing data, but that can be easily backed up somewhere else.
Just curious if anyone has gone this method and how it went.