What is the power draw (Idle and Actively reading)?
Does it have active cooling?
This seems like a good design for a kludgy (or temporary) NAS.
However, it can get problematic if the onboard electronics malfunction. This could destroy hard disks (an Amazon review mentions this).
Overall, appears to be dicey solution to turn precious individual hard drives into NAS.
Idle power-draw sitting at 3.5W and actively reading at 4.7W and actively-writing at 5.1W. This is for just 1 3.5" disk connected. It will be less for a 2.5" disk.
No, and it can get a bit hot. I have used it in a cabinet which was ventilation cooled. If anyone finds a mod where a fan can be added, let me know I can 3-d print it for extra cost obviously. One good thing is that it spins down the hard drives, thus saving on power and also giving a chance for HDDs to cool. It works perfectly with SSDs though
This would be a concern for everything possible in the world . I mean what if my UPS malfunctions and destroys my SMPS. What if my SMPS malfunctions and it destroys motherboard, cpu, ram and hard drives. But yes, valid concern, I mean the house can catch fire and the precious hard drives can be ruined too.
That being said for in last 9 years, I have used it in 2 ways -
I would use it as my in-house monthly backup for all my VMs. I would load hard drives, connect it to my PC, run my backup routines and it would take/sync backup overnight and I disconnect in morning.
Later, after I moved to India, I had to sell my storage server in US, I temporarily used it as USB NAS for around a year after I finally found a Cooler Master Cosmos SE 2 -Cabinet to hold 12 hard drives - #16 by nik1234
