Direct Attached Storage (DAS) Recommendations

#1

I am out growing my Mac-mini USB ports and the external USB drives and I am looking to replace with DAS. Not as NAS cause I hear it’s not recommended for recording to with simultaneously playback. Right now I record to the local drive and then move to external for playback later.
Also, don’t have an interest in moving channels DVR to a NAS I am comfortable running from Mac-mini.

My search has only brought up a couple of options, the QNAP TR-004, Drobo 5D3 and OWC 4-Bay.

I like to feature of the drobo where I can use different sized drives. This can let me grow my raid as storage needs grow. But I have seen poor reviews on the drobo’s and they have been out of stock for a couple of months. Makes me think they are on the outs.

Thoughts and recommendations?

#2

Have you checked out CalDigit ?

I use their USB-C Pro dock and a couple of their AV Pro 2 drive enclosures.

#3

I too have been worried about the future of Drobo. I have had them fail in the past. Until recently I had been using a Drobo 5C for all my Plex and Channels media. And I was using an older Drobo to back up that drive. But a few months ago I purchased 2 OWC Thunderbay enclosures and eight 4 TB WD Red Pro drives. I’m using one as my media server and the other as a backup. They have been flawless. The speed is more than fast enough and I feel I can rest easier knowing that my media library is more future-proofed. Btw, I am running everything on a 2014 iMac but may soon jump over to an M1 Mac mini.

#4

Was in the same situation, MacMini with USB 8TB. Nearing 7TB I was also worried about drive failure. I setup a TrueNAS on the network providing drive recovery. The MacMinin runs a cronjob to move recorded files to TrueNAS (which is listed as a secondary path) at the top of the hour or hours when recording is light (i.e. 1am only or 1am, 2am 3am ,5am, 7am, 9am, 11am, 1pm, 3pm). I run with 8 tuners, although rarely use all of them, Spectrum, and Sling, and have never had a recording problem. I'm sure other NAS might be similar in function. I chose TrueNAS because the entire hardware can fail and I can import the drives into different system without data loss. I have a Drobo, but use it only for offline backup, like others, I feel I cannot rely upon the Drobo hardware forever. Good luck!