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I ghettoed it. Might work for you.
Since my main nas was using all 6 satas I wanted to expand.
Got a PCIe SAS card, 2 SAS to SATA external cables, each cable goes to 4 satas.
For the disks I got a backplane for 8 disks, a random tower, a cheap PSU and have the sas to SATA cables going from one tower to the other. The PSU is jumped, I still need to get a button for it.
I just dumped the backplane in the case, nothing is fixed. Need to work something out, eventually.
I love this :D
You may wish to consider just building a proper home NAS into a chassis like DS380 with a cheap ITX board and a decent controller if you need the throughput.
Well, I want to use the hardware i have at home first bevore i buy a new nas. But having an external hdd rack would also allow me to seperate storage from computation and make everything a bit more modular
Oh no, I'm just suggesting upcycling someones old itx hardware and new chassis and making something that isn't literally fragile.
Also, USB SATA controllers in those external hard drives tend to suck.
Here is the issue with modularity like you are planning. If a cable is loose because something bumped into it you now have a problem to chase. Even worse you now have the potential for a power cable to become completely unplugged while the host is still up and running. Having two power supplies also creates a potential for a ground loop through the data cables if things are not made correctly.
Some people have been able to use USB drives connected to a computer to create a NAS but they are also the ones hitting forums because they have issues. What you are trying to do isn't much different. If you want to keep your hardware you would be much better off getting a case that can hold all your drives. A used server chassis would be ideal if you use a SAS card. But if you are going to upgrade anyway maybe it's a time to make plans to make the switch sooner than later.
Do some commercial solutions for this exist that are safe, yes they also live in racks and are effectively ground connected with the cabling protected/much less likely to be bumped into.
so you basicly also recommend getting a proper case and psu to fit everything into one machine?
Yes.
It eliminates risks.
For example I have a proper NAS, a server with one large drive, and 2 external drives.
Guess what I never have a problem with? The NAS or the internal drives. Occasionally one of the external drives will just disappear from the server, because they're not really intended to be up 24/7. So I'll have to power cycle it.
Also those external drives don't have any active cooling - they weren't designed for that use case. So I've found they tend to get warm if I'm copying anything to them, and now have an old case fan on them. Talk about janky.
You can get cages like this: https://www.newegg.com/rosewill-rsv-sata-cage-34-hard-disk-drive-cage/p/N82E16816132037
They're designed to be internal, but you can use them externally if you just run power out the back of the case, and a SATA breakout cable for data. It's janky, but it shouldn't have any issues.
Personally, I built out a Jonsbo N3 case. They're pretty well liked.
i assume you also put all your computing into the Jonsbo N3? This case also has an integrated powersupply? if yes this kinda looks a bit like what i am looking for.
Yes, I only have the one unit. (And also a Firebat mini PC, but they don't share storage.)
The Jonsbo case does not include a power supply, you have to install that along with the motherboard, drives, etc.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| NAS | Network-Attached Storage |
| PCIe | Peripheral Component Interconnect Express |
| PSU | Power Supply Unit |
| SATA | Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage |
| SSD | Solid State Drive mass storage |
5 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 7 acronyms.
[Thread #185 for this comm, first seen 23rd Mar 2026, 14:30] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
For a little perspective, if you have 7200 RPM HDDs, they each only have a throughput of about 1.5 Gbps. USB 3.0 is 5 Gbps, so you can have 3 drives attached without maxing out a single USB connection, and that's the older 3.0, not any of the newer USB specifications that can go up to 20 gbps, and this isn't including thunderbolt specs. If this data is mostly sent over the network you'll never see any impact from this unless you have a 10Gb home network. Getting things onto the drives might take a little longer than a direct connection, but if storage is more of a concern (I'm assuming it is, since you have HDDs instead of SSDs) that's a perfectly fine trade off in my mind.
well, USB is known to be kinda iffy with random timeouts etc. I dont know. I would like to have those drives in a raid5 configuration and i assume running all of this over a single connection would throttle everything down. I heard e-sata would be a better alternative but also kinda slow. my server sadly doesnt support thunderbold. Also i am a bit worried that the reading speeds would be to slow for something like jellyfin (if that isnt already the case)
Before I switched to my big NAS, I had 7 extra USB drives attached to my old ones, daisy chained over two USB 3.0 hubs. The USB connection was never the limiting factor.
You would need something like 3 people simultaneously streaming a 4k movie from 3 different HDDs for that to be an issue.
HDD speed itself might be more limiting, but still would require multiple very high bitrate streams to max out the read speed of a general USB drive.
Yeah i assume that the hdds might be more the limiting factor. As mentioned, i am just worried about usb causing troubles with my data.