Can you use a NAS as a DAS?

Peat Moss

Gawd
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Oct 6, 2009
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Just curious...after doing a lot of research looking for a good diskless external hard drive enclosures (DAS), I found that DAS's are usually not really well built. Every DAS I looked at had very mediocre reviews on all the major retail sites, with the most common complaints being a) fan noise b) PSU buzzing, c) drives or drive letters not being recognized, or dropped connections. Reading through reviews and comments for various models didn't give me a lot of confidence in plopping down money for one.

It got me thinking of looking into a NAS instead. I found that there weren't nearly as many complaints about most NAS devices. Since most NAS devices have USB ports as well as ethernet connections, I wondered if I could just use a NAS as a DAS instead? I don't need the network or cloud functions right now. Maybe later if I needed a NAS, I could just use the same device.
 
Just curious...after doing a lot of research looking for a good diskless external hard drive enclosures (DAS), I found that DAS's are usually not really well built. Every DAS I looked at had very mediocre reviews on all the major retail sites, with the most common complaints being a) fan noise b) PSU buzzing, c) drives or drive letters not being recognized, or dropped connections. Reading through reviews and comments for various models didn't give me a lot of confidence in plopping down money for one.

It got me thinking of looking into a NAS instead. I found that there weren't nearly as many complaints about most NAS devices. Since most NAS devices have USB ports as well as ethernet connections, I wondered if I could just use a NAS as a DAS instead? I don't need the network or cloud functions right now. Maybe later if I needed a NAS, I could just use the same device.
NAS would be limited by your network speed, so if you only use gigabit you will be limited to 120MB/s transfers.

The ones I saw with USB ports, the USB is used for the device itself, to copy to and from USB drives, not to connect to a PC.

I am using this Mediasonic ProBox and it's been working fine since I got it a few weeks ago.
IMG_7900.JPEG
 
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NAS would be limited by your network speed, so if you only use gigabit you will be limited to 120MB/s transfers.

The ones I saw with USB ports, the USB is used for the device itself, to copy to and from USB drives, not to connect to a PC.

I am using this Mediasonic ProBox and it's been working fine since I got it a few weeks ago.
View attachment 272236

Thanks. I've read that the Mediasonic boxes run fairly hot.
 
Thanks. I've read that the Mediasonic boxes run fairly hot.
I have 2 drives in mine at the moment,
Drives M and S are in the Mediasonic box, a 4TB Seagate and 12TB WD drive.
The rest are in my case, well, X is a bare SSD sitting on the Mediasonic box, used that temporarily to install Flight Sim 2020.
CrystalDisk-Mediasonic.jpg
 
It got me thinking of looking into a NAS instead. I found that there weren't nearly as many complaints about most NAS devices. Since most NAS devices have USB ports as well as ethernet connections, I wondered if I could just use a NAS as a DAS instead? I don't need the network or cloud functions right now. Maybe later if I needed a NAS, I could just use the same device.

Yes, many SOHO and SMB NAS systems can be used direct attached, be that USB or SATA (via eSATA). Check the manuals.
 
I have 2 drives in mine at the moment,
Drives M and S are in the Mediasonic box, a 4TB Seagate and 12TB WD drive.
The rest are in my case, well, X is a bare SSD sitting on the Mediasonic box, used that temporarily to install Flight Sim 2020.
View attachment 272257

Thanks. Are you are to hot swap drives if one fails without losing connection to the other drives? That is another common complaint with external hard drive enclosures.
 
Thanks. Are you are to hot swap drives if one fails without losing connection to the other drives? That is another common complaint with external hard drive enclosures.

I just tested it and added and swapped a pair of drives and it didn't lose connection to the 2 drives I already had in there.

Disk Management and File Explorer both show the empty drive bays

disk-management.jpg MY-PC-file-explorer.jpg
 
Get another PC and two 10 Gb ethernet cards, then do iSCSI between your NAS PC and your workstation.

Only drawback is that you want plenty of RAM in both machines.
 
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