DAS question

[Mcthommo]

Wonder if anyone could answer a couple of things before I purchase wrong thing: brother is needing a large amount of storage for his media collection- has currently around 28TB of stuff on various external HDDs- photos, music, videos etc built up over many many years of travel and downloads etc.
looking for a simple solution where a number of large HDD could be in one single case/place and accessed by just one machine- is currently a mac mini m4- not needing to access from differnt places or machines and unlikely to do so.
Would a DAS, something like the Terramaster D5-310 be something to look at rather than say Synology NAS? He would only need to play files from his mac mini, stream itunes to his tv- I assume the mac mini would effectively be the server? He likes the idea of being able to just bang in drives, set up a large JBOD and have a large pool for all his stuff. Redundancy is not required as he will keep the original data on the current external HDD
Thanks for any advice as I only build machines rather than this complicated thing

 

[Demon]

Wonder if anyone could answer a couple of things before I purchase wrong thing: brother is needing a large amount of storage for his media collection- has currently around 28TB of stuff on various external HDDs- photos, music, videos etc built up over many many years of travel and downloads etc.
looking for a simple solution where a number of large HDD could be in one single case/place and accessed by just one machine- is currently a mac mini m4- not needing to access from differnt places or machines and unlikely to do so.
Would a DAS, something like the Terramaster D5-310 be something to look at rather than say Synology NAS? He would only need to play files from his mac mini, stream itunes to his tv- I assume the mac mini would effectively be the server? He likes the idea of being able to just bang in drives, set up a large JBOD and have a large pool for all his stuff. Redundancy is not required as he will keep the original data on the current external HDD
Thanks for any advice as I only build machines rather than this complicated thing

Yes, a DAS should fit.

There are different types of DAS, some offer built in 'RAID' which tries to merge them altogether with some protection, and some offer JBOD (so each disk just appears as another drive on the host PC), some offer both modes.

I have a Terramaster D6-320 which is the simplest of DAS, its USB-C and is JBOD only and works perfectly, if I have 6 HDDs in it, I see 6 HDDs appear on my PC, which I use as normal HDDs as if they are within the computer..
I have heard some companies refer to JBOD as effectively merging the disks together to present one large disk.. avoid those!

Personally I'd not want to use any RAID or feature that merges the disks together blindly within the device as you lack overall control and visibility of what is going on and sounds fraught, this is where a NAS comes in anyway..

 

[Mcthommo]

Thanks for the response- looks like that should work just as long as itunes allows to add more than one location into a library- I'm sure that it does

Cheers

 

[Demon]

Thanks for the response- looks like that should work just as long as itunes allows to add more than one location into a library- I'm sure that it does

Cheers

And whilst it doesn't look as nice, the D6-320 is 10gbps usb-c and can get 1GB per second disk speed, if writing/reading multiple disks at once (very useful if later used alongside a NAS)..

THe D5-320 is limited to 200MB/sec which is OK for a single disk, but if you later wanted to attach it to a NAS and take advantage of RAID etc, it'd be dog slow..