My main NAS is as in the signature below. I have been using a QNAP TS-420 for backup and on this several Seagate USB drives that I (mostly) got very cheap around three years ago so now out of warranty. They are sized 2, 3, 4 and 6 TB. All a bit messy on the desktop with multiple power supplies etc. I decided to find alternative housing for the USB drives and shuck them. Building a second NAS for the purpose wasn’t an option as it is hard to buy suitable cases in New Zealand and mini ITX boards are scarce and expensive. I didn’t want a desktop sized machine as I have two Windows desktops already.
This device looked interesting so I bought one from AliExpres and an Orico 2.5 to 3.5 HD adaptor.
Obviously this is glorified USB storage so it would need OMV on a separate system to make it all work. This was solved by using my existing Proxmox system (on a Topton i7 mini PC Chinese NUC clone) and an OMV VM. The Orico is passed through to the VM via a USB C Thunderbolt port.
As to the Orico they make several similar devices, this model attracted me as it has USB C. It also has hardware RAID or JBOD selector switches if you want I, don’t use them. I shucked the USB drives and fitted them and a new 8 TB. All working well as a second NAS for backups. The device sleeps the drives after a short period of disuse, some may not want this but I don’t know if you can change this setting. It suits my use case.
Some minor pitfalls:
No remote power on/off as it has a power button on the back. I had hoped a wifi power adaptor would enable this but it needs a button press to power up. But with the drives sleeping not really a big problem. Obviously it can be powered off remotely with the wifi power adaptor. Useful as I am away from home a lot for work.
Transferring the ext4 formatted drives from QNAP was not as expected, I had to reformat all but one, not sure why this is, no doubt the way QNAP formats drives.
USB C speed advantages not realised as limiter is drive and LAN speed. Copying around 250 GB of video files from one drive to another by local rsync took around 24 hours. All drives 5400 rpm Seagate no doubt SMR.
All considered happy with it, the drives wake when you want to use. One drive LED remains on to indicate the device is powered but when sleeping the drive LEDs are off.